Thinking; an introduction to its history and science

THINKING

AN INTRODUCTION
TO ITS HISTORY AND SCIENCE

FRED CASEY

THE LIBRARY
OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

GIFT OF

Hilde Dietzgen Charlton
In Memory of
Her Mother

THINKING

THINKING

AN INTRODUCTION TO

ITS HISTORY AND SCIENCE

BY

FRED CASEY

1922.
THE LABOUR PUBLISHING COMPANY LTD,

6, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON, W.C.i

PREFACE

It i> hoped that this little sketch of the story of
thinking will be of service to those who have neither
the time to study or money to purchase the more
extensive and expensive wor

Beyond the manner of presentation, the ch .
diagrams and a few opinions at the end of each part,
the writer can lay no claim to originality, and since
this is obvious, no attempt has been made to give the
sources of quotations, as such would only burden the
book with references of no practical value to those
for whom it is intended. Some of the sources of
information taken generally are indicated in the
bibliography.

• A print of two charts illustrating the development of the main
lines of thought of the principal thinkers from Thales to Marx and
Bergson with their names, dates and the chief characteristics of
their thinking, for use in connection with Chapters I — VIII, can be
obtained from The Plebs Book Department. 162a. Buckingham
Palace Road, London S.W.1 Price 1 -. post free 1 2.

CONTENTS

PART I.

THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
CHAP. PACE

I Introduction 1 1

II Rise of Greek Philosophy .

III Decadence of Greek Philosophy . 41

IV Philosophy in the Middle Agi . si
V Philosophy from Descartes to Kant . 65

VI The Philosophy of Immamti. Kant . 7s
VII Idealism from Kant to Bergson .
VIII Materialism from Roger Bacon to Marx ioi

PART II.
LOGIC, OR THE SCIENCE OF UNDERSTANDING.

IX Logic Applied to the General Nam
of Thought (Mind) and of Thin
(Matter) . . . . . .121

X Logic Applied to Physical Sen . 138

XI Logic Applied to MENTAL and Moral

Problems . . . . • .15-
XII Various Examples of Applied Logic . 17"

Bibliography

Index

PART I
THE HIS! i >RY I IF PHILOSi >I'H\

THINKING

ITS

HISTORY and SCIEN( I

PART /.
The History of Philosophy.

CHAPTER I*

Introduction

Has the render ever (old a lie? If 50, was if
to tell that lie. or better, could it ever he right to lie'
It is easy to say people ought not to tell lie-, but
when deciding about oneself it becomes a most un-
comfortable question; we will therefore change the
subject by asking a few others of varying character.

What is Irue democracy?

Would the practice of humanitarian principl.
good for society ?

Ts education good for the working class?

If socialism is bound to come, of what use air
social science classes ?

Has man a free will ?

Why do we say that living things have life?

Why is evil desirable?

Does machine production benefit society?

Ts happiness as an end in view morally JUStil

Would it be right for socialists • the

property of capitalists, or. is it r i L,r 1 1 1 to -teal -

* See footnote to Preface.

12 THINKING

Is it desirable that all people should have good
health ?

Are strikes unreasonable?

Are majorities always right ?

Should workers serve on trade union executives ?

The essential character of all these questions—
of every question in fact — is contained in the one
question what is truth ? What is the truth concerning
this ? What is the truth concerning that ? In
various ways this great master question has occupied
the attention of human beings ever since their brains
began to think. In the following chapters it will be
our business to briefly review the development of the
enquiry. In the last chapter we shall attempt answers
to the questions already posed, whilst in the present
one we shall prepare our minds for what is to follow,
but will first take a look at some fallacious methods
employed in endeavouring to arrive at truth.

In places where there is sawdust on the floor
and where men go to drink beer, budding politicians
can often be heard loudly asking " What did Gladstone
say in 1864?" In more refined circles it takes
the form of " What did Herbert Spencer say in
his 'First Principles'?" In ultra religious circles
it is "What did Christ say?" And in some
socialist circles "What did Marx say?" Not one
of the three latter is any more intellectual than
the politician of the " sawdust school," for if a
man cannot demonstrate the truth of his propositions
" off his own bat," then his appeal to authority is
nothing but a demonstration of his own ignorance.
Of course the above contains no prejudice against
merely quoting a source of information so long as it is
not taken as proved without further consideration.
Another form of this argument occurs when some
person appeals for the acceptance of what he calls his
views, on the ground that they are held by millions of
people and therefore they are likely to be right. And
still another form exists in cases where men claim
knowledge because of the length of time they have held
certain views, as, for example, in many socialist clubs

I HIV: :

when- men can be heard that th<

members for twelve ■

know what socialism is. whereupon 01

years and a hall and ti i equent i

their view9 accepted becau e

better."

Another attempted way ol arriving at truti
take an example from tne
is to go round to the churches of dil
dons, pick out the best from their d
and add them together in a new combinati
"mixed pickles." But, how does a man knov
the best t The same kind ol i

political schools of thought.

Then there arc people who Ba> tl
we do we ought at leasl he broadminded ju

though it were po--il.lt' • sdminded about

propositions as that two and two make four I:

question ^roadmindedness i-, a- a matter

superfine name for ignorance a do no-

action because they suspend judgment, s,, n •

being broadminded amount- to them acting wit!

knowled

A species of broadmindedness more pan
relating to the question of whether there
a God, appears under the nai
from the inconsistency of contemplating
the same time two possibilities each of which
tradicts the other, in |
any chance act as though "
in reality proves them to be materialisl
believe there is no God, though in the face of the
dominant respectability of pre-ent ■' .'.
too cowardly to admit it.

Then again, some people rel) upon comn
just as if common sense w a- bound to be ritfhl
quite re^ardle-- of the fact that in different
different aspects of common .ail

Returning to the question of truth

UggeSt that all pei
truth,*' for if they did not know when they were i

14 THINKING

they could never tell when they were wrong; so no
great harm will be done by applying a test. If every
reader will put the above questions to a dozen friends,
separately, he will not get exactly the same answers to
every question from every person. Under such circum-
stances how will he know which is right ? for evidently
two different answers to the same question cannot both
be true. This leaves us just where we were. We are
still seeking truth, as the old Greeks were two
thousand six hundred years ago. Truth is only
another name for knowledge, or wisdom, and the
Greek word for wise is " sophos."

Now, how much of this wisdom do we possess, how
much do we really know ? We are all acquainted with
the old saying " seeing is believing," so let us tackle
the problem from that standpoint. Take a piece of
board, two feet square and half an inch thick, say a
small drawing-board; if this is held at arm's length it
gives us the impression of a square, but if we turn it
part way round, like a half-open door, we see an
oblong; if wre continue turning it goes narrower,
until it gives us the impression of a straight line half
an inch wide. What shape is it? Square, of course,
because we saw it that way first. But suppose we had
seen it the other way first, would it in that case not be
square ? Moreover, if a lighted spirit lamp be placed
between us and the board, but low down so that it
heats the air between ourselves and the board, the
straight edges of the board appear as wavy lines.
Again, if we see it through a child's telescope, with
the small lens nearest the board, it will appear to be
smaller. Or a person troubled with astigmatism (a
faulty curvature of the lens of the eye) may see it with
some edges blurred, or out of focus, whilst others are
sharp. The shape of the board, then, depends upon
its position in relation to ourselves, our eyes, and the
condition of the air or other medium through which we
see it; and since this shape varies with different
persons, or with variations in the combination of other
factors, how can we say which is the true shape?

Or consider its colour. Let us agree that the board

1 HINK1

nice light brown «
shadow is cast on some ,
darker shade than the
will have no colour at all; so 1. i
IS its true COloui

Ah, well; it seeing i> not beli<
should give us a better foundation

the board hard 01

our fingers but soft it we feel with

chisel, bo in itsell we cannol

ts it heavy? It is heavy to i luld hut

a strong man. [s it solid? It is sohd ii

our fingers though it hut it cannot

given sufficient time, water would pass tin

therefore we cannol say whether the b

heavy or truly -olid, lor meieU feeling at ii

no clue.

The foregoing, of course, <h I
problems by any means. As anol
might ask how can three individuals be
time one individual: How can ma
say that an individual man is such hecai;
ot mankind, then mankind i> the unit and
individual man is a part of that unit, cons<
part is only a traction and not a o I
Again, the universe remain- I
it is constantly changing ; how can that t
be said that the universe doe- chang<
are changing, what possibility ts there QJ
all.' And yet. there must be truth
could only find it; at least so it seemed to t:.--
Greeks who were the first I
tematically with such questions. 1;
did not possess truth, hut they were longifl
they " loved truth for its own sake," and
irrespective of consequence-. 1 he)
lovers of truth, and the < ireek word foi lovil
'• philos," wherefore putting " pi
together we see how the men wl.
truth, were " lovers of wisdom "

In those days a philosopher

16 THINKING

truth in any field of enquiry, astronomy, mathematics,
logic, ethics; though as time went on certain branches
of knowledge became specialised, as, for example,
theology, and later different sciences, such as chemistry,
geology, botany, astronomy, mathematics, physics,
psychology, and many others, so that in modern times
philosophy is left with such questions as the relation of
the one to the many, the essential or underlying natures
of matter, of mind and of life; the existence of God,
the question of free will, the question of a future life,
the relation between mind and matter, or as it is called,
between " thinking" and " being," and it will be our
business in succeeding chapters to follow, in outline,
the development of the enquiry from its beginning in
the Greek colony in Asia Minor, approximately six
hundred years before Christ, up to the present time,
and to show the positive results achieved; but since
thinking cannot be understood without reference to
the material conditions governing the lives of the
thinkers during any given period, it will be useful,
briefly, to review the material conditions that preceded
and ultimately made possible that branch of thinking
we now know as philosophy.

In the illimitable space we call the sky there are
thousands of enormous masses of matter greater than
our earth flying about at speeds of anything
approaching twenty miles a second. They are cold and
dark, but when two of these meet they smash each
other into atoms, and their motion is converted into a
frightful heat. They become a vast white-hot cloud or
nebula of fine particles, millions of miles in extent.
This nebula begins to contract, and part of the heat is
given off; but the contraction, by the friction of the
particles, causes a still greater heat in the interior, so
that as the body becomes more condensed it assumes
a character that we might faintly imagine by thinking
of a mass of molten iron, though immensely more so.
Such intense heat breaks up even the atoms into their
basic " strain centres " or electrons. With the uneven
condensation of such an irregularly shaped body it
begins to turn round, and as it increases the spinning

THINKING 17

motion, it throws off great portions of itself. It is
supposed that our sun was at one time a body of this
kind, and that our earth is one of the portions thrown
pinning into space. The earth then was originally
a ball of nery matter, and its Btory from that time is
essentially one of cooling, and the consequences fol-
lowing from that cooling.

As the heat passed away through space, the different
systems of electrons settled into their peculiar atoms,
such as oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, etc.. which act and
re-act on one another, and which existed a^ gases
forming an atmosphere round the central molten
mass. In time the melted matter cooled so much that
it formed a skin or crust on the outside. With further
cooling the oxygen and hydrogen combined to form
water which as it rained down on the central mass was
rapidly driven off in the form of steam, only to con-
dense and come clown again to repeat the proce- s, 1
process which, of course, hastened the cooling of the
general body, and resulted in forming an ocean
surrounding the greater part of the globe. So now
there were three layers of matter surrounding the
molten centre — a crust of rock, a layer of water and
an atmosphere of gases.

But the centre had not gone to sleep; the titanic
inside forces were in opposition to the contracting
crust of rock, and as the crust cracked, large masses of
it were thrust upward out of the water. This naturally
redistributed the pressure on the centre, and since the
oxygen and hydrogen that formed the water was now
taken out of the atmosphere, the atmosphere lost its
former enormous pressure (estimated at 5,000 lbs. to
the square inch), consequently such land as there was
above water tended to increase until it formed a huge
continent surrounding the northern hemisphere. Tor-
rents of rain wore the high parts of the land away, and
.in tons of sediment settled on the lower levels and on
the floor of the ocean this increased pressure made
large tracks of land sink while it forced others higher
out of the water, and in some cases actually bent the
surface upward in huge wrinkles, thus forming chains

B

18 THINKING

of mountains. In this way that part of the northern
land that is now the bed of the Atlantic Ocean was
forced under water, and similarly were stretches of
land from Africa to Brazil and from Africa to
Australia also lost, while Africa and South America
took their present form. The re-distribution of land
and water, the purifying of the atmosphere through
the plants consuming the carbon dioxide, the forming
of great lakes and the forcing of great tracts of land
up into the colder atmosphere, all tended to bring about
important climatic changes resulting in immense sheets
of ice which, as they shifted, scarred and tore the
surface of the land, and, as they melted, formed rivers,
channels and lakes. All these changes had a great
deal to do with the forms of living things that for
thousands of rears had dwelt on the earth, so we must
now go back to follow their evolution.

Just as it is normal under certain conditions for
gunpowder to explode, or a match to burn, so is it
normal for matter in certain other combinations to
exhibit the phenomena we call life. Accordingly life
is not a thing, but a function. " When did living
things first appear? Where did they come from?
What was their character? Frankly, we do not know."
The many different combinations of matter had been
evolving from the time of the firemist, or nebula, so
there is evidently no point at which we could say when
a certain combination was living. We therefore
arbitrarily select the point when minute specks of
the combination called protoplasm (the known physical
basis of all living things) were formed, and lived
individual lives millions of years ago in the original
ocean. These specks of jelly, about one-thousandth
of an inch in diameter, were the parent stock from
which both plants and animals developed. Among
very low organisms it is exceedingly difficult to tell
which are plants and which are animals, the points
being much disputed, but it is usual to call them plants
if they take their food from the chemicals of the air,
water, or land, and convert these into protoplasm,
and to call them animals if they take ready-made proto-

THINKING 19

plasm as their food, that is, if they live on plants or
other animals.

If the organism feeds on air, water, etc., it has no
need to move or to develop organs of sense, except to
a very limited extent, so it becomes rooted and stays
where it is; but the organism that lives on other
organisms must go and find them, or follow them, or
at least develop limbs for catching them as they come
near, and so it develops the necessary organs of sense
which enable it to respond to its environment ; accord-
ingly we got the two divisions of living things, plants
and animals. Plants passed through various stages,
from the green matter that we see clinging to a
rainspout, through sea-weeds, ferns, flowers with sex
organs, and an immense variety up to the monster
trees of the Coal Age (estimated at from twenty to
twenty-eight million years ago). In the sea, animals
existed at this time in great numbers and variety, as
the result of an evolution from the lower forms. There
were amceboids, or single-celled animals, then clusters
of cells that double in on themselves, forming
stomachs. Higher in the scale some cells specialise
as germ or sex cells, and some become especially
sensitive; the latter are gathered together in the head
and ultimately become brains that are connected with
the organs of sense; the digestive cells line the
stomach, while other cells develop the functions of
locomotion, excretion, etc. Some animals, such as
sponges, corals, etc., attached themselves to the floor
of the ocean and developed suckers or arms for
catching unwary swimmers; others swam about in
search of food, preying on one another, and it is the
evolution of the latter branch through the forms of
fishes, reptiles, birds and mammals that lead up to
man.

Long before the Coal Age, animals up to the level
of the fish had existed in the sea, but there were no
land animals such as we know, because they could not
have existed until the plants had freed the atmosphere
from carbon dioxide — a food for plants but a poison
for air-breathing animals. As the struggle for life

20 THINKING

became more intense with every increase in numbers,
and particularly as the re-formation of the land had
resulted in enclosed lakes from which there was no
escape to the open sea, the hunted ones made their
escape by taking" to the land, the swimming" bags of
the fishes being converted into lungs and their fins into
feet. These amphibia later became reptiles of enor-
mous size, though with exceedingly small brains.
Ultimately the giants perished through lack of food
when parts of the earth became very cold and ice-
bound; again it was a question of escape to warmer
climes, and it was the swifter, most intelligent, warm-
blooded and smaller animals (those requiring least
food) that survived. Once again, for escape as
numbers increased, the web-footed leaping lizards took,
as it were, to swimming in the air, and so developed
into birds, while another type of reptile developed
mammary glands by which the young could be fed
from the mother after birth. This latter evolution is
supposed to have taken place on the now lost continent
between Africa and Brazil. These part-reptile part-
mammal creatures had a coat of hair to keep them
warm, and four-chambered hearts to supply richer and
warmer blood to their bodies; due to this, and the
anxieties of existence, they developed a brain capacity
beyond what had been before. There were many
species of them, all belonging to the lowest class of
mammals, and they gradually overran the earth, so
that from one or other all the present-day varied types
of animals have been evolved. One of the latter
types, the lemur, about the size of a cat, and assumed
to have been evolved on the lost Afro-Asian continent,
is supposed to be the common ancestor of monkeys,
apes and men. The fore feet of lemurs developed into
hands with which they climbed into the trees where
they lived. It is supposed that this development of
hands afforded scope for the development of brains,
since it enabled their possessors to undertake many
activities denied to other animals; and it is further
conjectured that tree climbing led eventually to an
upright posture as found in man. Man has therefore

THINKING 21

been evolved from the lemur, through an ape Stage,
though not from any existing ape: the apes are his
■ins, that is all.

The home of the ape-men, probably a million years
was south of Asia; from that time onwards the
story is one of increasing intelligence or capacity <>i
brain functioning, and increasing ability in the making
of tools. They lived in caves or trees, with no language
or religion, no knowledge of how they came to be
horn, nor any knowledge of what we mean by death.
They u^cd sharp flints as choppers; they discovered the
use of tire probably from the sparks of iron ore ; they
began to live in communities for purposo of defence,
and gradually emerged from their state of savagery
into the barbarian stage. During this sta.^e, religious
practices came into being, also the spoken langu
written language began with drawings on the borders
of caves and on rocks. Religious practice
through ignorance regarding natural forces, such as
thunder, lightning, germinal forces, and so on: abstract
things, such as Springtime, came to be personified and
reckoned as gods. Understanding death as merely a
longer duration of sleep, they had no idea of anything
but life, consequently with them dead men had simply
urone to live in the immortal regions, and from dream.s
they got their ideas of the immortal interior. A
combination of religious belief and spoken language
produced the later mythologies and legends of .
devils, immortal life, heaven, virgin births, and so on.
All this time the development of tools was having its
effect in so far as with newer and better tools it was
possible to accumulate a store of food, which rendered
it unnecessary to wander about in search of it; hut, to
pass from barbarism to civilisation, with an ordered
and centralised government, needed something besides
mere hand tools. Peace, in which to develop social
organisation, along with a continuous supply of food
in one locality, are the two primary essentials for
civilisation, and we have now to see the reasons why
the first civilisation took place in Egypt.

Since animals live on plants or other animals, their

22 THINKING

basic food is vegetable. Vegetation depends upon the
presence of moisture, ultimately rain, and a given
rainfall depends upon the direction of moisture-carrying
wind, which again depends on many geographical
factors, such as the existence of mountains. A con-
tinued supply of food depended accordingly on a
certain combination of material conditions. Where
those conditions enabled barbarians to get the neces-
saries of life with a lesser expenditure of energy than
formerly, energy was saved for other purposes: in
this lies the essential character of progress. Now
those tribes that lived in places accessible to other
tribes, and which were therefore open to attack, had
to expend a great deal of energy in defence; accord-
ingly, those who were naturally protected by the sea,
deserts, mountain ranges, and so on, stood the best
chance of becoming civilised, and nowhere were those
conditions so complete as in Egypt along the valley of
the Nile, which is protected on the east and west by
deserts, partly so on the south, and by the sea on the
north. The warm winds from the west bring their
moisture from the Atlantic across the great Sahara
desert ; they are turned upward by the high lands south
of Egypt, whereupon they lose their grip of the
moisture, which rains down on the gathering grounds
of the river Nile, in central Africa and Abyssinia.
South of Assuam there is a great tract of sandstone
which, being comparatively soft, has been worn by the
river into very deep gorges from which the water
cannot spread, consequently nothing will grow for any
distance on either side; but north of Assuam the base
is hard limestone, in which the river has first worn a
valley approximately ten miles wide, and has covered
this with soil brought down with the floods from the
Abyssinian mountains. These floods occur periodic-
ally, which circumstance constitutes another important
factor in our story of civilising conditions, for in
tropical countries one day is very like another the
whole year round, so there is no necessity to provide
for the future, but outside the tropics there are seasonal
changes, more and more severe with approach to

TIIINKINC 23

temperate regions, and the>c changes necessitate
provision for the bad periods, but such provision cannot
be satisfactorily carried oul without some centre of
authority. Here accordingly were the kind of soH, the

moisture, the peaceful conditions, and the necessity of
making provision for the future which implii

centralised directive administration, which conditions,
taken altogether, are necessary for barbarians to
develop into civilised men. The development took a
very long time, in all probability some thousands of
years before the period of those whom we call the
Ancient Egyptians, and the latter date from about
4500 B.<

The next most likely set of conditions existed in
Mesopotamia, between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris,
with Babylon as the centre; but without outlining them
here, it will be sufficient for our purpose to point out
that those two peoples were kept apart by the Syrian
desert. The Babylonians were subject to invasions of
Semitic tribes which from time to time surged out of
Arabia, a high land with a singularly pure air, whose
inhabitants bred in numbers out of all proportion to
the means of feeding them, so they went out in great
hordes to the lands " flowing with milk and honey,"
and became more or less absorbed and civilised. But
while the two principal civilisations were, in the
beginning, kept apart by the Syrian desert, a few-
thousand years of tool development wrought a change;
they had tamed and domesticated animals for working
and for transport, invented new weapons in response
to the wandering Semitic invaders, they could produce
more wealth of certain kinds than they needed for their
own use, and could afford to trade with it, they could
produce an abundant supply of food that could be
carried on pack animals; with all this, travel, trading
and war, on an ever increasing scale, became possible.
But the Syrian desert was still impassable for regular
intercourse, therefore the easiest way was what
became the urreat north road from Egypt across the
Sinai desert, up through Syria, round the top of the
great desert, and down the Euphrates valley. Over

24 THINKING

these roads many wars were fought, the Jews in
Palestine ultimately getting crushed and scattered.

But there were also other tribes from farther north
and east, Assyrians, Medes and Persians, who fought
and traded in these parts, so that the whole region
now known as the Near East became the centre of
conflicting civilisations whose trade was constantly
being pushed north-west into Asia Minor and along
its southern shore. Meanwhile the Phoenicians who
lived along the coast of Western Syria, with ideas of
river boats originally brought from the Euphrates,
had tackled the problem of the sea and had traded
along the north of Africa to Carthage and other places ;
they came in conflict with Greeks, who were also a
seafaring people. Persia had in the later times become
the dominant power of the then civilised world; she
had already colonised a great part of Asia Minor and
developed trade all along its southern shore, as well as
in the ^gean Sea; she represented the East pushing
out to conquer the West. But the Greeks had also
done some colonising in Asia Minor; they were war-
like on sea as well as on land, and had ideas of the
conquest of Persia; they represented the West out to
conquer the East, and naturally the conflict in war
followed the paths of the conflict in trade because there
lay the roads for men to travel ; consequently it is
along those paths we should expect to find the greatest
conflict of ideas or thinking. Along those trading
routes were, for those times, great cities, one of
which, called Miletus, was situated at the mouth of the
river Meander, in the south-west of Asia Minor, and
here lived Thales, who came of a high Phoenician
family, and who is regarded as the earliest of Greek
philosophers ; he might be represented as the western
spear-head of the scientific thinking of his day, piercing
the thousands of years' old religious traditions of the
east.

Abstract. From even such an exceedingly general
outline as the present, a thoughtful reader will
be able to gather that just as life is a function of
certain combinations of naturally evolved matter, so is

THINKING 2.5

thinking a function of naturally evolved special parts
of that matter— organs of sense and brains; thereafter
thinking depends upon the material relations between
animals and the resl of nature. Accordingly, since
men, the animals with hands, possess the capacity for
making tools by which they modify the relations
between themselves and nature, they consequently
by those means modify their thinking, for in pro-
portion as better tools led to increased production and
consequent trading, so did trading develop a wider
type of society, and so were strangers thrown more
and more into contact with each other. With regard to
religious thought, not only they but their different gods
also came into conflict; this, along with other factors,
led eventually towards the idea of onr God. We have
seen that animals, apart from man. evolve along
biological lines, but the factor of tool development
necessitates changes in man's soeial relations so that
man evolves sociologically. The changes in social
relations reflect themselves in thinking and appear as
customs, laws, religions, philosophies and sciences.
Trading, for example, required standards of measure-
ment in exchanging quantities of goods (arithmetic i,
also methods of measuring land and roads (geometry),
the navigation of the sea, and dozens of other things;
but just as changing material conditions led their
thinking in a scientific direction, so did this thinking
come in conflict with the unscientific superstitions and
religious explanations of all things supposed to have
been got direct from the gods. All things were
recognised to be constantly changing, but since they
did not come from nothing, or pass into nothing, it
was thought that some one substance must be the base
of all things, and it is the merit of the ancient
philosophers to have begun the search for that one
thing which remained permanent through all its
changing forms, or in other words, to have begun the
search for universal rock-bottom truth.

CHAPTER II
Rise of Greek Philosophy

Newer tools brought trading. Trading brought war
in which prisoners were made into slaves. From being
the common property of a tribe, the tools became the
private property of individuals, and, through the
private ownership of the products, led to the forming
of social classes with different inner classes and castes,
the whole divided broadly into masters and slaves.
This had happened long prior to the rise of Greece,
therefore the glories of Greek architecture, literature,
statecraft, philosophy, etc., were the outcome of a
mode of production where slaves performed the work;
nor could they have come into being without slavery.
Of course, when speaking of the Ancient Greeks we
never mean the slaves, without whose work the culture
could never have taken place, nevertheless it is true
that philosophers could not live on mere learning, they
must have been provided for by somebody, so evidently
chattel slavery was the economic basis of a great social
advance; it produced its particular types of thinking,
and so far as philosophy is concerned we must now
consider the chief doctrines of the exponents of that
thinking.

As indicated in the last chapter, the beginning of
philosophical enquiry is associated with the name of
THALES (born about 636 B.C., of Miletus) who
imagined the one universal substance to be water —
the blood of animals is watery, plants cannot exist
without water, even " dry " land contains a per-
centage of water, and so on. He was a philosopher
because he sought essential truth; this is his merit, his

26

THINKING

actual work otherwise was of no use. lie was a

naturalist because he turned to natural substances in bis
investigations.

ANAXIMENES (c. 560-480 B.C.. of Miletus)
thought he had found the universal essence in air
our souls were composed of air or spirit. Therefore
from a natural and sensuous thing be derived the
infinite: water was for him limited, it was too coarse,
but in air, which we feel though do not see. we have
a liner thing that pervades all things (ether).

ANAXIMANDER (born about 610 B.C.. of Miletus)
declared that an unlimited and infinite substance was
the essence of all things, but did not say what it was;
he did not define it as any one thing, such as air or
water, but merely spoke of it as the principle of all
change, of all becoming and passing away; it was
" that " out of which worlds and gods arise and into
wdiich they ultimately return. It was immortal, had
no beginning and would never pass away; it therefore
contained everything within it, or rather Was every-
thing in continuity.

MKRACLITUS (576-480 B.C., of Ephcsus, a city a
little north of Miletus) thought the moving spirit of
all things was fire (not flame — more properly heat, the
principle of fire), but since fire or heat was constantly
changing there was not even one thing in the universe
that did not change; this was, of course, rather
awkward for those who wanted to find something
permanent.

PYTHAGORAS (6th century B.C., of Samos, an
island off the coast of Asia Minor, not far from
Miletus and Ephesus. afterwards settled at Crotona in
S. Italy) conceived the essential nature of things to be
number. The universe is " one," but so is every
single part " one." Combinations of parts, no matter
how many, become " one," for example, the number
of pages in a book, or the number of vibrations in a
musical note and the number of beats in its duration;
" one " is the beginning of all things, the starting
point in all calculations. Had he used this idea
symbolically, as arithmetic is used to-day, it would

28 THINKING

have been intelligible, but according to G. H. Lewes,
on the authority of Aristotle, he went on to suppose
that number was the essence of things.

Pythagoras was the founder of mathematics, the
discoverer of proportion in musical harmony, and the
founder of a religious sect in Crotona where he taught
the immortality and transmigration of souls.

ANAXAGORAS (500-418 B.C., of Clazomenae in
Lydia, the centre of S.W. Asia Minor; afterwards went
to Athens) taught that everything existed from
eternity, but that things were separate and not in
continuity as with Anaximander. They were originally
all mixed up, but have been and are continually being
sorted out, as time goes on, by intelligence which sees
in them their distinct and useful qualities; wherefore
since useful things can not be such without, apparently,
an intelligent appreciation of them, we see the essential
nature of all things to be due to Mind or Intelligence.
In this way he reduced the many kinds of things (they
had all existed through all time) serving different
purposes, and usually referred to as " the wonderful
order in the universe," to the one primary motion or
cause (not a moral guidance). " The Infinite Intelli-
gence was the architect of the Infinite Matter." Mind
was the one moving spirit that fashioned or arranged
the many material phenomena, but, as other philo-
sophers complained, he did not show the connection
between the one and the many, or, we might say, did
not explain the nature of the one by reference to the
different purposes served by the many, a doctrine
known as " teleology."

PARMENIDES (born c. 536 B.C., of Elea, now
called Velia, in S. Italy) made a decided distinction
between thoughts obtained through reason and those
obtained through the senses. Since the senses showed
him a world wherein all was change, thoughts got in
that way could at best be only opinions, because we
never could say " for certain." But in addition to
those he had certain convictions that he felt were true ;
the latter thoughts, which according to him were
produced by " reason alone," led him to the con-

Til IX KING 29

elusion that in truth nothing changed, for all the
seeming change was only illusion

ZENO (c. 490-435 B.C., "I 1 lea, and afterwards
Athens), a pupil of Parmenides, in defending his
masters apparent contradictions, invented the method
of argument known as "dialectics," which consi-ts
in showing the error in a .statement by reducing it to
absurdity through questioning and cross-questioning,
with the object of ultimately arriving at truth. lie
propounded several puzzles, of which the following
may be taken as a type: a stone when thrown a
distance conies at the cud to a state of rest, hut hefore
it reaches the end it has to pass the middle; as this
middle is the cud of a shorter distance, the stone is at
rest there also, and similarly since every point is an
end. whether it is called middle or not, the stone is
really at rest all the time, although it seemed to move.
By such arguments Xeno attempted to prove that
motion could not take place, so, amongst all the
change going on in the universe, both he and his
master taught that nothing changed, for motion was
impossible.

At this time, and for a considerable period after-
wards, Athens was the " hub of the universe," and the
chief city in Greece. Greece was not a country
governed from one centre, as England is governed
from London, hut was composed of separate city
States, each with its own government and laws to suit
itself. As .already mentioned, the tireeks had
colonised parts of S.W. Asia Minor, whose coastdand
was called Ionia. The philosophers belonging to this
region form the Ionian school; those coming from
Miletus being sometimes spoken of as the Milesian
school. The reader will remember that these philo-
sophers had sought truth in natural objects, such as
water, air, etc: they were, therefore, naturalists or
physicists. Southern Italy had also been colonised, and
its philosophers of course form the Italian school, one
portion ol which is referred to as the Bleatic, because
its chief representatives were natives of Idea. Bui
while the loiiians were physicists, the Italians (Pytha-

30 THINKING

goras, Parmenides, Zeno, etc.) had developed along"
abstract lines, and had sought truth by mathematical
and dialectical reasoning, that is, by leaving nature
alone and relying entirely on their minds. The
beginning of this abstract inquiry might be traced back
to the " Mind " of Anaxagoras, or even to the
" Infinite " of Anaximander. There were therefore
two types of thinking in the physicists on the one hand,
and the mathematicians or dialecticians on the other.
Athens was, of course, the great centre of attraction
for all Greeks, and when, in course of time, Zeno
arrived there, the dialectical line of enquiry came into
conflict with the physical. This conflict resulted in
establishing dialectics as the correct method to be used
in philosophic enquiry, which means that philosophers
must turn away from nature and solve their problems
by argument, that is, by thought alone; it also led to
the creation of the Sophists and Sceptics.

The Sophists were, as their name implies, men of
knowledge, or at least they were regarded as such by
those who paid to learn from them. They travelled
from city to city teaching for a living, but they were
dialecticians who could prove anything to be right if
it suited them, just as a barrister might with superior
argument plead successfully for the life of a murderer.
Travelling about, they found in different cities different
laws in relation to different conditions; what was right
in one place was wrong in another. To them there
was no absolute truth, so it was no use attempting to
teach definite systems of knowledge; they taught
accordingly the art of rhetoric in pleading any cause,
but particularly in politics and law, because there being
no real truth, one opinion is as good as another, and
those persons are likely to come best off who most
cleverly understand and use the art of persuasion.
They were the Relativists of their time, but this
relativity must not be identified with modern relativity,
it was only " the protest of baffled minds." The
Sophists came to be regarded as dishonest reasoners
who knew they could prove nothing but were all along
pretending to do so. The Sceptics were at least

THINKING 31

honest, they knew they could prove nothing and said
so, nevertheless this put them in a worse position than

the Sophists, if. indeed, it could be called a position, for
no thinking man can rest content with nothing; they
were the Agnostics of their time, their numbers
developed as time went on, so that eventually they
practically killed philosophy in Greece. We shall refer
to them later.

It is said that Greek philosophy, properly speaking,
begins with SOCRATES <4<";.-,o<) BO, of Athene,
inasmuch as he, the son of a sculptor, who frequented
any place where men gathered together, there to argue
with anybody who would, so developed the art of
dialectics as to make of it a new method of enquiry in
philosophy. He was very severe on the Sophists who
had no basis of truth, and by his merciless questioning
brought out the idea that if one thing was right under
some conditions, another thing under Others, and so
on, this could only be on the assumption that there
was a " right " that remained permanently right
independently of how men thought, and consequently
it was the business of a philosopher to employ
dialectics in order to discover the essential and
permanent natures of such things as Tightness, justice,
honesty, bravery, love, etc., and to define those natures
in such a way that they might be generally understood
and accepted as moral standards for all men; first
define and then deduce, in this we can see the beginning
of logical system.

This concept, of the permanence of a certain inner
nature which could not be grasped by the senses hut
by the understanding alone, although only applied to
morality by Socrates, was afterwards more widely
applied by Plato and became the keynote of his whole
teaching. Meanwhile it was the first step towards
elaborating ethics as a science, so we see one branch
of philosophy gradually turning away from the problem
of the nature of existence to that of conduct, or what
should men do in order to do right, or again, what
should be the aim in life. From this side of Socrates'
teaching flow two schools of thought the Cyrenaic,

32 THINKING

so named from Cyrene, the native place of Aristippus
its chief exponent, and the Cynic with Antisthenes as
its leader.

ARISTIPPUS (430-360 B.C., of Cyrene in Africa)
was influenced by the Sophists as to the impossibility
of arriving at the truth of anything, because since each
person judges according to his impressions, no one
can be trusted to judge correctly; but he was also
influenced by Socrates, who had dwelt much on the
permanent nature of The Good. Aristippus thought
the greatest good was to be found in pleasure, but for
the attainment of constant pleasure one must not
overdo the thing, therefore a moderate pleasure was
the best aim in life.

ANTISTHENES (c. 445-370 B.C., of Athens)
studied under the Sophists, and even established a
school, but afterwards took both himself and his
students to learn from Socrates. He became captivated
by the idea of the moral perfection of man; this
impulse he got from Socrates, but never took to the
method of Socrates, and consequently was one-sided.

In his pursuit of moral perfection he adopted the
simple life, but carried it to extremes. He made a god
of poverty, and ostentatiously paraded it. He was a
man of gloomy temper and snarling ways, and it is
said that the name Cynic (the Greek name for dog) was
given to him and his followers because they lived the
lives of dogs. According to him the best aim in life
was to attain the virtues of moral perfection by casting
away all the comforts of easy living that might
interfere with the development of our moral natures,
and his followers went to such an extent as to ignore
not only life's comforts, but even its ordinary decencies.
Diogenes, who lived and died in the streets, was
probably the best known member of this school.

The other side of Socrates' teaching was the more
truly philosophic in that it clung to the search for that
permanent something which abides through all the
changes of its parts. This line of thought, as already
indicated, was taken up and developed by PLATO
(427-346 B.C., of Athens).

THINKING 33

Aiistocles, surnamed Plato (the broad-browcd or
broad-shouldered), was of an illustrious line; on the

maternal side he was connected with Solon (c. 638-
c. 558 B.C.), the great Greek statesman, and. as with

many great names, he was the subject of fable; for
instance, he was said to be the child of Apollo and a
virgin. Well educated, and skilled in gymnastics, he
competed in the great games. He learned dialectics
from Socrates, but was previously acquainted with
Cratylus who, as a follower of Heraclitns, taught that
all things changed therefore no truth could be stated.
Plato found no satisfaction in this, although it was true
that all things that appeared tu his senses did indeed
change.

In the teaching of Anaxagoras he found the idea of
a universal mind; in that of Parmenides the idea of a
permanent and unchanging universe; from the fol-
lowers of Pythagoras he learned of the immortality of
souls; but it was from Socrates he got the chief cine
to his doctrine. Socrates had taught the permanent
moral natures of Tightness, justice, honesty, and the
like. Plato carried this farther and imagined real
permanent natures of all other things, both abstract
and concrete, such as straightness, equality, men,
animals, etc. All the individuals of any one species
were, so to speak, more or less perfect, though perish-
able, copies or imitations of their genus or essential
natures. For the purpose of explaining, we might
imagine the permanent nature of man to be a pattern
from which individual men were made, or, that
individual men partook more or less of the perfection
of the pattern which existed in reality on its own
account. With Plato this general nature or pattern
was not a mere thought, it existed whether we wen-
aware of it or not, it could not be seen with the eyes,
nor indeed grasped by any of the senses, it could only
be understood. Each separate species had its own
general nature, which Plato called its Form or Idea;
in those days the word " idea " did not mean a thought
in the mind as it does with us. With a further
extension he conceived all the different Forms to be

o

THINKING 35

parts of one universal Form, the Supreme Mind or
Intelligence — the Soul of the World. Fig. i may serve
to make this clear. This Soul of the World, or
Universal Intelligence pervading the world, was thai
permanent truth which was the goal of philosophy, it
was the one in relation to the many.

Since only what satisfies the intelligence can be
regarded as real, and since only philosophers who
possess a high degree of intelligence can apprehend
reality, so, in Plato's opinion, ought the rulers of
communities to be philosophers, and so was he led to
write the " Republic," a Utopia in which he outlined
the training necessary to provide the State with such
rulers.

"He had a small house and garden a mile or so from
Athens, and near the Academy, or garden adjoining
the sacred precincts of Hecademus. Here there were
shady walks, and a gymnasium, where he founded his
school of philosophy, which for centuries was known
as the Academy," and it was here that Aristotle, one
of the greatest thinkers of Cjreece, studied as a young
man.

ARISTOTLE (384-322 B.C., of Stagira, on the west
coast of what is now the Gulf of Contezza, in northern
( ireece) was the son of a physician who died leaving
him at the age of seventeen his own master, young,
ardent, ambitious and rich, lie was slender in person,
had delicate health, hut was an astonishing brain
worker, lie went to Athens, where he remained about
twenty years, studying, and writing on a vast number of
subjects — Ethics, Rhetoric, Logic, Poetic>, Zoology,
Comparative Anatomy, Psychology, Physics, Astro
nomy, etc., so there can be no attempl made to do
justice to his work in such a brief outline as the present,
lie was disliked by certain political leaders, who accused
him of blasphemy, inasmuch as he had paid homage to
mortals by raising statues in memory of his friend
Hermias and to his wile Pythias. He escaped from
Athens and retired to Chalcis, but after Plato died,
returned to find Xenocrates teaching in the Academy, so
obtained permission to teach morning and evening in

36 THINKING

the Peripatos or shady walks of the Lyceum, the finest
of Athens' gymnasia.

He studied philosophy under Plato, but complained
that his master did not give a satisfactory account of the
connection between the imperishable Forms and their
perishable representations, or, as it is put, between " the
one and the many." Believing with Plato that eternal
Forms existed, he differed, in thinking that those Forms
did not exist apart from their copies, but rather that
they actually dwelt in the perishable bodies of the things
to which they gave that Form, and that the conception
of their separate existence was nothing but a mental
abstraction; to give an instance, manliness was not a
something existing apart from men, but was the
common nature or Soul that dwelt in all men taken
together; men therefore were mixtures of soul and
body or mind and matter. But so also had all other
species their common nature, Soul or Form, that dwelt
in the perishable material bodies of the individuals of
each species. The Supreme Mind or God was pure
Form without matter, it was complete perfection,
separate from the world, and taking no notice of
worldly imperfection; but on the other hand, the more
or less imperfect Forms of the worldly species were
striving to attain the perfection of God, and the desire
for that perfection was the source of all motion. A
knowledge of this, it was supposed, would enable us to
understand what man should do to attain this final end.
For that purpose Aristotle tried to establish a science
of ethics and with regard to society, a science of politics.
Since the more knowledge men possessed, the greater
the advantage they would have in striving towards
perfection, they should not ignore worldly things
altogether, but strive to understand those also; in
conformity with the latter teaching he did much work
in mapping out the limits of the various sciences, and
gave a newer form and content to the general science
of logic, the science that underlies all sciences; but he
did not, as is popularly supposed, either invent logic,
or even give it its name, nevertheless, much of what he
did in the domain of logic appears in our text-books

THINKING 37

to-day, though it required a different economic ground
work to show its faults; in those days it must have
;eemed perfect.
We now go back fifty or sixty years to the definite

materialist doctrine of l>KM< CRITUS ( 400— 370 !'..< '..

of Abdera in Thrace, on the £gean Sea), who said
there is nothing that is true, or, what is true does not
appear to us, for the reason that while sensations are
hue as far as they go, yet they are only sensations, and
consequently cannot constitute the true nature of the
objects that cause the sensations. The universe, he
thought, consisted of an immense number of material
atoms, combined in different ways to produce the
different things which lie called Forms (of course very
different from Plato's), such as sweetness, heat, colour
and so on. Each Form gave rise to our sensations by
throwing off, as it wire, a layer of atoms arranged
according to its own peculiar combination, a material
image of itself, which image was projected on our
organs of sense. This was an early attempt at
psychology. The atoms he thought were too small ever
to become known by the senses, and could he under-
stood only by the faculty of Reflection; they needed no
Creator, for they had always existed, and by their own
inherent movements had collided and combined to
produce the many different bodies of which our senses
are aware. Democritus therefore had no divine
principle in his philosophy as had Plato and Aristotle.

It may be convenient at this point to give the gist of
the Sceptics' argument. The most notable among them
was PYRRHO (date unknown of Elis), who main-
tained that the only knowledge we had was that of
sensation, but, we could not get at truth through our
senses, because we could not say for certain that t hex-
represented objects outside US, and since Reason of
necessity had only sensations to reason about, then
Reason was just as powerless; so no positive statement
could be made about anything, for nothing could
be proved or disproved.

It remains for us to notice two schools, the Epicurean
and the Stoic, each a mixture of certain lines of thought

38 THINKING

already noticed. The Epicurean takes its name from
EPICURUS (342 — 272 B.C., of Samos), whose teaching
was a further development of that of the Cyrenaic
school of pleasure, though it was not so extreme as has
been believed. Their psychology and physics they
derived from Democritus, which means they believed in
a permanent material world wherein sensation was due
to the flow of material atoms. With this, it follows
they did not recognise any divine principle, and
accordingly quarrelled severely with the Stoics, from
whom much of their misrepresentation as being
sensualist has come. Since they rejected the divine
principle in Platonic and Aristotelian systems their
ethics rest upon their own Reason, combined with Free
Will. So, the atomic or purely material basis of
Democritus was the ground work of their sensations,
and agreeable and disagreeable sensations were the
bases of moralities, therefore whatever was pleasant
became the rightful object of existence.

ZENO (360 — 270 B.C., of Citium, a small city in
Cyprus), the representative stoic, began his philoso-
phical career by joining the Cynics, but their manners
were too gross and indecent. He studied in, and
learned from, other schools, particularly the Platonic,
and finally opened a school of his own in the Stoa, or
Porch, from which it got the name of the Stoic. At
Zeno's time Greece, honeycombed with sophistry,
scepticism, indifference, sensuality and Epicurean
softness, was fast going to pieces. Zeno tried to save
his people by an appeal to their manliness, and by an
attempt to re-establish morality on a basis that would
be sound because independent of human frailty.

The Sceptics said that truth could not be attained
because sensation, which could not be trusted, was all
there was to work with. The Stoics replied that some
sensations must be true if some are false, for it is
impossible to have error without truth, and that Reason
distinguishes between them by sifting the clear evidence
from the unclear, or that which in reality is not
evidence; this amounted to the statement that " evidence
needs no proof." In nature they saw two elements, the

I 1 1 INK IXC. 39

matter, and God or the Reason which governs nutter.
They did not believe in free will, hut in a destiny
arranged by God, who was the only Reason in the
world. Their morality was a rigid suppression of
sensuous enjoyment, a doctrine fundamentally the saun-
as the Cynics', hut purified of much of the grossi
This hardening of the mind and cultivation of fortitude
under severe strain, even unto death, were the
characteristics which made their teaching acceptable to
the conquering Romans, hecause it had much in
common with the latter's own harder nature. Since the
Sceptics had reduced knowledge to the limits of
sensation, and since the Stoics could not believe this hut
could find no satisfactory answer, they fell back on faith
in that Reason which to them was Cod directing the
world; so we see philosophy as philosophy at the end
of its tether for the time Being; it sank hack into faith,
lost its pride and became an aid to religion.

Abstract. — The early philosophers turned away
from supernatural myths to the study of nature in the
search for essential truth or underlying unity of all
things, but not finding this in material objects, turned
to the study of Mind and Thinking. They discovered
or invented logic, a method of thinking which enabled
them to arrange their thoughts and to make distinctions
between universals and particulars, the one and the
many. But this only increased their difficulties because
it divided the universe into Mind and Matter without in
any way explaining the obvious connection between the
two, while it destroyed their confidence in finding truth
by the aid of sense perception.

The result manifested itself in two main lines of
thought, on the one hand Scepticism, wherein nothing
could he known, and on the other Morality, the Stoic
branch of which relied for its essential truth on faith in
the supernatural: the relatively unthinking people
simply took life as it came and in the ordinary common-
sense manner wandered on from day to day. There-
fore philosophy started by throwing faith overb
only after two and a half centuries to return to it. The
positive result achieved was the evolution of their

40 THINKING

method of enquiry, the logic referred to above; but this
did not attain scientific value until it had been consider-
ably modified in much later times, nor was there any
real science of thinking until our own times. Mean-
while we must witness the rise of Christianity, and the
combination of philosophy and religion.

CHAPTER III

Decadence of Greek Philosophy

We have said that philosophy returned to faith,
though if we look closely we shall see that, apart from
the Ionian school, some germs of faith had been
running through it all the time; nor could it very well
have been otherwise, for whenever people take up a new
study they cannot help being influenced by their
previous thinking, therefore they of necessity approach
it with a certain degree of bias. Of course philosophers
are just the people who are supposed to have no bias,
a mistaken view which was shown very plainly in the
Italian school, in the interest they took in individual
souls and their transmigration. But taken on the
whole, Greek philosophy was fairly free from religious
trammels, for there was no powerful priesthood, or
sacred book, nor did the philosophers interest them-
selves overmuch in their popular pagan gods. It is true
Anaxagoras had been banished for blaspheming the sun
and moon by saying they were made of the same sort of
matter as the earth ; Socrates had been executed because
of his rationalist tendencies, and Aristotle had been
indicted for impiety; but in all these cases there were
powerful political motives, the religious one being only
a cloak. Such conflict as there was between philosophy
and religion, particularly in their later developments,
arose from the fact that they were both concerned with
the same problems, namely, those concerning the nature
of that ultimate reality which both have called God.
Consequently, given a certain degree of social develop
Blent, neither could exist without the other, and in this
chapter we shall be occupied in tracing the main

41

42 THINKING

converging lines of religious and philosophic thought.

Barbarian ignorance of natural phenomena such as
thunder, storms, floods, germination, birth (concep-
tion), death, etc., was the basis on which arose religious
practices and as society developed according to
changing economic conditions, there came into being
social classes of different grades, one of which was the
priestly caste beginning with such rude forms as, for
example, the medicine men of the uncivilised American
Indians. These men became the doctors and historians
of the tribe, and necessarily such learning as there was,
apart from technicalities of fishing, hunting, etc.,
became their particular stock-in-trade. In time they
became the especial guardians of all sacred traditions
and ritual, and in such a superstitious age were regarded
as sacred and holy men, fit to teach and direct the
people, for they only were in touch with the gods.
Each tribe had its own god, consequently, as their small
worlds opened out through trade and conquest, the
conflict of different gods ended in the triumph of the
idea of there being only one God. But in proportion as
this idea gained ground, so did the local character of
the tribal god disappear, his place being taken by a God
who no longer dwelt in one's own village but away
somewhere, always away; he was an unapproachable
God except through the medium of the priests and
prophets.

In India, out of a personified nature worship arose
Vedism, the early faith of Hindu-Aryans, and from this
came Brahmanism. Brahma was the Creator, and
was a unitarian God. Brahmanism was taught by a
priestly caste, but later developed into Hinduism, with a
trinity and a splitting up of worship. In Persia,
Zoroaster, about 800 B.C., taught one God with
a personal divinity; while in Syria the wandering
Semitic tribes from the South and East, who became
the Jewish nation, and who had the tribal religions of
Moses and other prophets, eventually developed the
idea of the one God of Israel.

Throughout the growth of the idea of one God, and
as the village or tribal god vanished into the misty

THINKING 43

n • of the »ky, the question of the relation of God
to man. and the character of the link or mediator,

between them necessarily became of more importance.
Here we see our old philosophical friend, the question
of the one and the many, mind and matter, • rod and the
world. Since the Jews lived right across the great
north road from Egypt to Assyria, with Palestine as
their centre, they were open to attack from all sides, and
as their tribal gods had vanished and could no longer
help them, their prophets foretold that the Great < rod
Jehovah would send a Messiah, who would deliver them
"from their troubles; then, as we all know, Christ was
born, and after a short life claimed to he that very
Messiah, the link between heaven and earth. The
Christian religion gradually spread along the northern
shores of Africa and across the Mediterranean to Italy,
ultimately to become, in the form of the Catholic
Church, the dominant religion of the Holy Roman
Empire.

We must now go back about three centuries and call
to mind that after the death of Aristotle, Greece began
to fall to pieces. The only philosophy that held the
field, apart from Aristotelian Science was Stoicism. As
Greece was gradually subdued by the Romans, Greek
culture naturally suffered considerably, and many of the
philosophers fled across the Mediterranean to Egypt.
Their Stoic doctrine was largely Platonic, but later
underwent a change, dividing broadly into two main
streams, one becoming Christian, the other anti-
( Christian. The anti-Christian embodied characteristics
that differed from those of Plato's time; we therefore
distinguish between the old Platonic school and the New
Platonists, or Neoplatonists, who took their rise about
the time of Christ, and who opposed Christianity- Just
as the meeting of Ionian and Italian philosophers in
Athens produced dialectics, and ultimately the science
of logic, so did the meeting of Stoic philosophers, or
their disciples, with the early Christians, lead to
Christian Theology; though we have here to do not so
much with Greeks, as with men of other nationalities
who had been influenced by Greek culture.

44 THINKING

Since our work in the main is to follow philosophy,
evidently it is not our business to discuss theology
except in so far as its development takes into account
questions of a philosphical character, such as the
freedom of the will, the relation between men and God,
or between the many and the one. In doing this we
must bear in mind that philosophy had developed two
broad lines; first, Scepticism, which of course had
nothing to do with religion, because it did not accept
anything as being known to be true; and second,
Morality, which was represented by Epicureans on the
one hand and Stoics on the other. Epicureans, as we
have seen, did not believe in any divine principle,
while the Stoics did, as of course did Christians.
Epicureanism entailed the belief in a free will, which
was in accord with Christianity, though its belief in
atomism with no divine principle was the very reverse.
It was therefore the Stoics who were the most
philosophically inclined to accept Christian principles.
But the Stoics pinned their faith to " destiny," and
accordingly did not believe in the freedom of the will,
and unless this principle is accepted the Christian
doctrine of atonement is useless, for if responsibility for
one's acts is not recognised and accepted, atonement
for sin has no meaning. Therefore those of the Stoics
and others who refused to come to terms with
Christianity, developed a religious belief of a mystical
character; these were the Neoplatonists; we will return
to them later.

The question of free will, which, by the way,
" philosophers " have not yet settled, led to a discussion
which ended in the general acceptance of the Christian
position (though even in the Church there was much
disagreement, as, for example, between Augustine and
Pelagius in the beginning of the fifth century), which is
that God is the source of all that is good, that man has
a free will to chose either good or evil, but when he
choses to do what he knows to be right, at that moment
God gives him the Grace to carry out his intention. It
was therefore not in his own strength that a Christian
fulfilled the moral law, but by the Grace of God. To

THINKING 45

win this Grace one must have faith in God and be a
member of God's Holy (wholly or unci Church. The
Christian counted himself a child of God by right oi

initiation through baptism, which could apply to all men

willing to become members of the oik- Holy Church,
whereas the lew was a child of God only by right ol

nationality, and the Stoic by individual right. There-
fore the possibility of applying the Christian principle of

initiation to all mankind, along with the feeling we all
have of acting freely, and the feeling that we must take
the consequences of our acts, won recognition in
Roman times, the more so because it was allied with
the hardness of the Stoic temper, though not in such an
extreme form as early Stoicism.

From the philosophic .standpoint, however, it was
more particularly the principle of having a mediator
between the one and the many that formed the link
between Platonic philosophy and Christian faith, and
this mediator was Jesus Christ, who was at one and the
same time both Cod and man, and was, moreover, the
only mediator.

There were other partially christianised systems of
religion that, largely influenced by their many former
and not entirely disregarded pagan gods, indulged their
fancy with long chains of mediators or divine beings
of different grades, and this tendency reacted on
Christianity in the institution of saints and angels;
though these have never by the authorities of the
Church been identified with the Divine nature, for
Christ alone was both Cod and man.

We have seen that Christians believed first, that God
was One; second, that His character was exemplified in
the life of Christ; and third, that personal intercourse
with Cod or Jesus was to be attained by loving service
to other men, for " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto
one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it
unto me" (Matt, xxv., 40). This kind of religious
belief gave rise to the philosophical question, what is
there in the nature of God and of man and of the
mediator between them which allows of such inter-
course, or, what is the unity amidsl all this multiplicity,

46 THINKING

or, to put it another way, how can God the Father, God
the Son, and the universal Spirit that dwells in the
faithful, or God the Holy Ghost, be three (a Trinity)
and at the same time one (a Unity) ? The view taken
by Christian theologians is that these three distinct
elements, each of which is God, find their unity in Love,
wherein all believers, even the most lowly, may be
united with God the Father through Jesus Christ, who
establishes the connection of the Supreme Godhead with
the material world. So we see that one branch of Stoic
philosophy became absorbed by, and subordinated to,
Christian Theology, and as far as Europe was concerned
remained in that humble position throughout the Middle
Ages.

Let us now go back to the other branch of the Stoics
and those who still thought after the manner of the
older schools, who became anti-Christian — the Neopla-
tonists. Here again we see a conflux of two streams,
but this time it is between Platonic philosophy and
eastern religious thought of the theosophical brand
which came from farther East than the seat of
Christianity. The Neoplatonists, in working out the
idea of mediation, sought rather to keep the Godhead
separate from the material world, while Christians had
sought to definitely connect them in the person of Jesus
Christ. Christians brought God down into the world,
Neoplatonists made the world strive towards God.

Philosophy, we remember, had been exiled from
Greece. In its old home Scepticism had killed it. " It
had started with the doubt of the child, had asked its
questions, attempted answers, and had finished with the
doubt of old age; " all it had left behind of permanent
value was a partly developed method of thinking —
Aristotelian logic. But if it found no worshippers in
Greece, it was welcomed in Egypt, where the doctrines
were new and therefore interesting. In Alexandria
several schools were formed, and here took place the
early struggles between Neoplatonist and Christian.
This city, lying in the track of a later sea trading route
between East and West, was naturally a great centre of
commerce, and in science came to rival Athens. All

THINKING 47

those people who Sought a refuge from Scepticism,

together might he called the Alexandrian school, while
the Neoplatonists constituted the most illustrious
section of that movement; in following them we shall
see the final act in the drama of Greek Philosophy.

Greek ideas of course had taken root in Alexandria
long before Christ, but Neoplatonism proper began
with a Jew named PHILO (born c. 20 B.C., of
Alexandria), who represented a mixture of Greek-
dialectics and Eastern mysticism. He had learned
dialectics from the works of Plato and others, but the
New Academicians (almost complete sceptics, who
taught long after Plato in Plato's old school, the
Academy), Arcesilaus and Carneades, had taught him to
apply the method sceptically. In the spirit of these men
he distrusted all knowledge gained by the senses, and
since Reason, reasoned on the basis of such knowledge,
then Reason itself could not get at truth. But besides
Greek dialectics of that kind he possessed a large
measure of Oriental mysticism, which led him to say
that though the Senses and Reason were powerless, and
thus far he was a philosopher, there was still the faculty
of Faith, and this, the gift of God, was real Science or
Knowledge; his philosophy then became theology.
With Philo, God was the one Unity; his nature could
never be known, but we knew of his existence in the
" The Word." This " Word " had a twofold character,
it was first, God's thought (mind), and second, God's
thought carried out or expressed in the existing world
as we know it (matter). We have already seen the
subordination of one branch of philosophy to
Christianity; we now see the other trying to establish a
rival theology and to found a Church. As regards
Epicureanism, this had long ago become indifferent, a
sort of common-sense scepticism.

Following Philo came PLOTINUS (c. 203—262 A.D.,
an Egyptian), the greatest of the Neoplatonists, who
thought with Plato that nothing but universals ( Forms)
could be true (see Fig. 1). We knew phenomena through
our senses, and the universals we knew through our
intelligence acting in relation to sense perceptions, but.

48 THINKING

since that ended the reasoning process, how were we to
know God ? Plotinus answered, that since Reason
could go no farther, we could only know God when in
a state of ecstacy, wherein Reason plays no part, for
Reason, if it could know the infinite would have to be
the Infinite; therefore we could only know God by
being God, and in a state of ecstacy or rapture we became
part of, or rather absorbed in God, and only in this way
could we come to know God. God stood revealed to
us only because we had become One with Him. This
state of rapture, he thought, might be gained in some
natures by Music (including poetry, beauty, rythm and
such like); other natures, such as those of philosophers,
were ravished through the contemplation of Unity and
Proportion (the wonderful order in the universe) ; others
again, by the pursuit of moral perfection executed in
the sphere of love and prayer. Ecstacy was not the
connection between the one and the many, the passage
from one state to the other was made without such a
mundane and even vulgar nuisance as a connection, for
such would have defiled the pure essence of God.

The Alexandrian Trinity (some say the Christian idea
of the Trinity was an imitation of the Alexandrian,
others say the reverse) consisted of three persons; the
third, or most inferior grade, was the soul or cause of
all the activity and life in worldly things ; the second was
the Intelligence or universal Being (universals); the first
was not Being of any kind, but simply Unity. Since
Unity was not Being, it was something that could never
be conceived in thought; it was not nothing, but " that
zvhich thought, that zvhich existed. " In like manner the
circus clown says the world rests on a rock, and that on
another rock, and that on the bottom; but this bottom
is unexplainable, mysterious; and the Alexandrian
Unity had the same mysterious character. So we see
that what remained of Platonic philosophy lost itself in
mysticism — the mysticism of the supernatural. (Let the
reader reserve his laugh until he has " done his bit " to
free the modern world from the same sort of thing; for
there are plenty of mystics living to-day whose breasts
swell with ecstatic fervour while thev listen to sermons,

THINKING 49

march to "glory," or, drunk with breath-arresting
asthetics, pay court in a hundred other ways to " the

beautiful.")

With regard to the creation of the world. Christiana
said that God created it out of nothing, for, being all
powerful, one thing was as easy as another. The
Alexandrian dialecticians maintained that out of nothing
nothing could come; they therefore accounted for the
world of many things by saying the many were simply
emanations of Clod's will, that is, the many consisted of
I iod's acts, not his substance.

From Alexandria, Plotinus went to Rome, and was
there associated with Porphyry and Iamblicus. In
Rome the Alexandrian school became a sort of Church,
and disputed with Christianity for world empire.
Christianity ascended the throne in the person of
Constantine. Afterwards Neoplatonism was repre-
sented there by Julian; but Christianity did not depend
upon support from Emperors, and continued to flourish
after it lost Constantine, whereas when the Neopla-
tonists lost Julian thev lost power and influence. Their
last fight for philosophic life took place with PROCLUS
(412 — 485 A.D., of Xanthus, Asia Minor, afterwards
Alexandria and Athens) as leader. He took Plato as an
idol. The inscription, " Know thyself," on the temple
at Delphi, Socrates had taken as an exhortation to
ethical study. Plato had taken it to mean that in
knowing one's self, that is, in knowing one's mind, one
would become acquainted with the eternal Forms. But
Proclus thought that in knowing ourselves we really
know the divine One, of whom oneself is but a ray of
that Unity. With Proclus metaphysics is the only
possible science; it descends to us from above, and is
more perfect than that which is the result of investiga-
tion. " Invention is the energy of the soul. " " Omnes
Scientia vera est a Deo " (All true knowledge comes
from God).

Proclus, the last genius of Xeoplatonism. had tried to
give it new life, but had failed, and under Justinian the
Alexandrian school became extinct. With this we may
say that Greek philosophy came to an end in its original

D

50 THINKING

home, for with the sack of Rome in the fifth century, by
barbarians from the North, and the general subjugation
of the Pagan civilisations of southern Europe, learning
in these regions suffered shipwreck; libraries were
destroyed, and the main portion of Aristotelian
philosophy and science migrated mainly to Syria, Arabia
and Persia. Meanwhile in Europe, as already stated,
a modified Platonic philosophy became the handmaid of
Roman Catholicism, and continued in that character
through the Dark Ages.

Abstract. — With the Stoics, philosophy returned
to faith. One portion of it became a sort of works
manager to Christian Faith, while the other trickled out
in mysticism. The only positive result was the
evolution of a partial method of logical thinking that
required further perfecting; in this lay the progress.
Apart somewhat from the above we have seen the bases
of two great lines of what became traditional thought —
the Pagan and the Christian. The Pagan thinking,
symbolised under the name of Aristotelianism, included
the physical science of the times, while Christian
thought appeared as the teaching of the Roman Catholic
Church.

CHAPTER IV

Philosophy in the Middle Ages

As the destruction of the Roman Empire had made
learning and the pursuit of knowledge on the former

scale impossible, through libraries being scattered,
endowments of centres of learning being confiscated,
and so on; teachers and scholars not under the auspices
of the Church had to seek a living elsewhere. They
went to Asia, whilst Christian theologians and teachers
remained in Europe. We shall now follow those two
branches of thought to show bow they ultimately unite
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and also the
consequent conflict of their separate influences during
the Renaissance.

The philosophy of Christianity was mainly Platonic,
but tbe Church possessed a little Aristotelian influence,
principally in the domain of science, more particularly in
the science of logic. When the shipwreck of learning
took place, by far the greater portion of Aristotle's
works were lost, or rather lost to Europe; but one of
the barbarian chieftains, Theodoric, himself not a
scholar, appointed as his ministers Cassiodorus and
Boetbius, two of the most learned men at bis disp
who were to save what they could from tbe wreck.
Cassiodorus (born about 480) founded monasteries,
wherein monks were to preserve such books as they bad.
and were to study them. Tin's bad a greal influence in
determining the available order ami extent of study
throughout the Middle Ages, because it brought about
the fact that during that period learning was under tbe
control of the faithful, which meant under the control

51

52 THINKING

of the Catholic Church. Boethius (c. 470 — 524)
occupied himself very largely in translating" from Greek
to Latin works of Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes
and Porphyry. Porphyry, we remember, was the
friend of Plotinus, a Neoplatonist and opponent of
Christianity, but he had written an introduction to
Aristotle's logic. This book, being only an introduc-
tion, was necessarily very elementary, but of logic they
had very little else from the ninth to the twelfth century.
Logic is concerned with making distinctions between
different things, or between different parts of a thing,
that they may be better understood through the
different things or parts being arranged or classified.
Porphyry's book dealt with minor and relatively
unimportant distinctions between Genera, Species,
Differences, Properties and Accidents; these were
known as the five predicables, and were supposed to
represent the different classes or grades of qualities
possessed by things; for example, taking the word
"animal" as the Genus, this Genus includes many
Species of animals, such as fish, the horse or man. But
man possesses many qualities called Differences, by
which he differs from all other species, such as the
power of articulate speech. He also possesses other
qualities called Properties, not so sharply defined as
differences, but yet possessed by the whole species, for
instance, a relative capacity for argument. And finally,
by accident as it were, men may or may not be tall, ugly,
fair or thickskinned, etc. ; such qualities, which do not
apply to the whole class are termed Accidents.
Porphyry's elementary logic, although it called atten-
tion to the relation between Genera and Species, yet did
not attempt the solution, for that question was too big
for such a small work, being in fact the root question in
philosophy — the one and the many, mind and matter,
God and the world, the Trinity, etc. ; nor did it receive
any particular attention throughout the Dark Ages, a
period consisting of from four to five centuries, during
which no great thinkers came to light ; but it became the
central point of discussion during the Scholastic period,
which occupied from about the ninth to the fifteenth

THINKING 53

century, for in the ninth century an intellectual
fermenl began, which developed in itensity as time
u enl on.

The scholars of those times, or the Schoolmen as they
are called, had received their training in the form <>i
Christian tradition, and to question the roots of that
teaching was no light task, the more so since they them-
selves were men of faith. Nevertheless, they began to
ask awkward questions concerning Genera and Species,
and even .attempted answers. This gave rise to a
discussion between what were called the Nominalists
and the Realists. AXSKI.M (1033 — [109, Archbishop
of Canterbury from 1003 till his death), whose doctrine
came ultimately from Plato, was a realist who believed
that universals (see Fig. 1) had a real existence;
ROSCELLINUS, his contemporary, took (partly from
Aristotle) the opposite view, that only individuals (the
Med copies of the universals) really existed, and
that universals were no more than names, that is, that
they existed only nominally. The latter view, of
course, denies the Oneness of the three Gods— the
doctrine of the Trinity. The discussion lasted for
centuries; meanwhile the scholastics practised the art of
argument and sharpened their wits by means of
elementary logic to such an extent that many of them,
such as Roscellinus and PETER ABEL ART) (1079 —
1142, of Palais, near Nantes, later a theologian of
Notre Dame, Paris) were becoming heretics. They
were substituting reason for faith, and that could
not be tolerated by the Fathers of the Church at any
cost. The whole period was one of confused thinking
and hair splitting arguments, so much so that the
Schoolmen, with their characteristic doubt, resembled
the Sophists of Socrates' time. There was accordingly
a philosophical disruption taking place, which might (so
it appears on the surface) possibly have been kept under
by the rulers of the Church, had it not been that in the
twelfth century many of the lost works of Aristotle at
last made their way into Europe. This recovery led to
important philosophical developments, and as a prelude
to a discussion of these we now go back to the dispersal

54 THINKING

of those works to briefly follow their course from
Greece to Asia and back to Europe.

The last of the Greek philosophers had been driven
by Justinian (483 — 565, Emperor of Constantinople and
Rome) to find refuge in Asia, and were welcomed in
Persia, but particularly in Bagdad. They took with
them the works of Aristotle, and the philosophy
contained in them became the basis of that which is
called Arabian. It is not Arabian, however, but Greek,
Jewish and Persian. Arabian philosophy represented a
small section of a great Mohammedan movement, and
at bottom constituted a reaction against Islam.
Islamism is a wide-spread religion founded by Mahomet
(or Mohammed, 571—632), who imagined himself the
apostle of God; its centre was Mecca, in Arabia. After
the death of Mahomet it spread north-east to Samarkand
and Bokhara (North of Afghanistan), north to Armenia
and Turkey, and north-west along the northern shores
of Africa to Morocco, and to Cordova in Andalusia
(southern Spain). The reaction to which we have
referred arose in those distant parts of the Arabian
Empire.

The Arabs were illiterate, but as they spread, they
endeavoured to glorify their dynasty with Letters, and
found many Greeks, Jews and Christians willing to give
them Arabian and Syriac translations of Athenian and
Alexandrian writers. Thus it came about that Aristotle
was presented under the guise of Arabian philosophy,
and was also mixed up with Alexandrian science.
Europe then is indebted to the Arabs for the
preservation of those Greek writings that had such an
influence during the period immediately preceding the
Renaissance.

While learning in Christian Europe in the tenth
century was decadent, Andalusia under Mohammedan
rule was the centre of light, and from Cordova, the
above mentioned city, came Averroes (c. 1126 — 1198).
who was born there. He translated, and commented
on, Aristotle's teaching, and his writings constituted
one of the principal media by which Arab culture spread
slowly through Europe. We have already seen that

THINKING

disputes were going on in Parisian theological quai

and that the Church of Koine had found it difficult to
keep heresy in check; but when the later worl
Aristotle were introduced, which seemed to offer an
explanation of almost everything, the disputes were
furious and deep. Aristotle had taught that the world
was eternal, had not been created, and would not end;
he had also taught that individual souls (though not the
soul of the species) were mortal, thus denying the
Christian doctrine of immortality; in fact this question
of what constituted an individual as distinct from a
universal was always obtruding. These doctrines were,
moreover, supported by a more advanced logic than had
been at the disposal of the men of Abelard's time. They
were, of course, directly opposed to Christian teaching,
so, to get such questions settled became a very urgent
matter." THOMAS AQUINAS (1226— 1274, of Aquino,
Italy), a Dominican, took the affair in hand and tried to
reconcile Aristotle and the Church. By his working out
he arrived at the idea that certain truths might be
discovered by man's reason, but there were other truths
that could only be known through supernatural
revelation, " though he loved Aristotle, he loved the
Church more." This ending to the attempt to reconcile
the two great lines of traditional thought — the Pagan
and the Christian, or logic (reason) and faith, only meant
that what could not be logically explained by reason in
such a manner that it would satisfy faith, must be left to
faith. However, there were other thinkers who were
not satisfied, because both traditions were dogmatic,
both had been regarded as infallible, and both were
concerned with the question of essential truth, yet
embodied different and apparently irreconcilable con-
clusions, so what could be made of it all? DUNS
SCOTUS (c. 1274 — 1308, British), a Franciscan, tried to
reconcile Nominalism and Realism, even as Aquinas had
tried, though he quarrelled with the latter on some
points, being more inclined to give prominence to the
reality of the individual, in so far as he thought that the
individual nature was a higher perfection of the
universal nature; in other words, he had a strong

56 THINKING

leaning towards Nominalism. WILLIAM of OCCAM
(died 1350, of Ockham, in Surrey), another Franciscan,
went much farther towards Nominalism, the growth of
which, since it cut out the reality of universals,
represented a desire to escape from both Christian and
Classical tradition. On the other hand, WILLIAM of
CHAMPEAUX was an out and out realist. There were
indeed some who thought of a double standard of truth
— that a thing might be true in philosophy but not in
theology, and vice versa, however, this need not be
discussed, as it was evidently quite unsatisfactory and
left no particular historic mark. It should go without
saying that Faith neither had or has any need to reason
or to argue, and we can see clearly how in doing so it
began its own undoing, for the fight between Reason
and Faith led to greater freedom in thinking, and, taken
on the whole, it became impossible any longer to
reconcile philosophy and theology; but to under-
stand the utter confusion of thought prevailing
with gradually increasing intensity throughout the
Scholastic period, and which culminated in the
breakdown of both Classical and Christian tradition,
we shall have to look at the material development
underlying it.

In pre-Christian and early Christian times Greece and
Rome were founded on wealth produced by chattel
slaves. In its early days Christianity had a hard fight,
but had become well established by the fifth century, at
which period pagan Rome became subject to northern
invaders. The object of conquest was, of course, that
the conquered might pay tribute, but tribute involved
the labour of the slaves, therefore extermination would
not have served the purpose of the conquerors; instead,
many of the new rulers or kings became converted to
Christianity, and so ruled their subjects through
concessions to the Pope, who held Spiritual Power over
the mass of the people; many even received their
coronation at his hands in spiritual righteousness. But
the kings did not forget to fight among themselves for
the purpose of extending their domains and acquiring
wealth and power. For this purpose, as time went on,

Till Ml 57

required ever greater and greatei numbei
fighting men and trusted leaders. The leaders re< ■
in payment grants of land, subject to a promise to fi^ht
for the kings when necessary. Bui land without laboui
was no use, and as the land was granted on condition-
of armed service on the kings' behalf, so also was the
labour that worked the land. And so it came about
that where former masters actually owned slaves in the
way they owned cattle, afterwards the slaves were nol
owned in person, but were attached to the land, and
should a lord be deposed in favour of another, the
slaves or serfs stayed where they were under the new
master. Since the system of landholding was founded
on military service, or fighting, it is spoken of as
Feudalism. There existed, then, a Spiritual Power and
a Military Power, both of which required monetary
support. The Church claimed tithes (the tenth part of
a man's income) for its clergy, who had to remit a
portion to Rome. Evidently what found its way to
Rome could not go into the pockets of the kings, and
naturally Church and kings quarrelled about " their
rights," the Church enforcing its views by thre.r.
excommunication; and excommunication was never a
small affair to a good Catholic, for " what doth it profit
a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of
his own soul ? "

Occasionally Rome claimed extraordinary tributes,
and for both ordinary and extraordinary, employe'
Italian merchants to collect the dues in the form of
merchandise, mainly wool, to have it dyed and woven,
to sell it and forward the proceeds, less a commission, to
Rome. These merchants became the Florentine
bankers. At the same time, there were many wandering
Jewish merchants and trader- also amassing mi i
with which they could accommodate needy kings and
nobles. Incidentally, we might point to the cultural
influence of these traders, who knew the different
languages of the people with whom they did busil
and who were therefore a great factor in the spread of
learning in art, in literature, in science, in law. in
comparative religion, in the keeping of accounts, and.

58 THINKING

therefore, in stewardship and the management of
estates, etc. As a blow against the rising power of
money, the Church condemned usury, so in virtue of
that condemnation, the nobles could satisfy at one and
the same time both their spiritual conscience and their
material well being, by refusing to pay interest on
borrowed money. Therefore, while the nobility
quarrelled with the Church, both were interested in
opposing the monetary power as power in the hands of
the trading or merchant class, while requiring it as
power for themselves.

Students of economic history are well aware that the
rise of the merchant class was the result of continued
improvement in tools a,nd general modes of producing
zvealth, which caused a greater and greater output,
requiring extensive travel to secure markets and
materials; all tending to the formation of different
groups, with different interests, which reflected them-
selves in correspondingly different modes of thought
expressed in the form of different political interests.
Politically, England, France, Holland, and Spain
became nations with national interests opposed to each
other, and to the restraints of the international Church,
while within those nations were groups with particular
interests opposed to the Church on the one hand and
the kings and nobles on the other. These groups were
the merchants, who required workers freed from the
feudal nobility, that is, freed from the land so that they
might be freely exploited through working for wages;
they wanted also to be free from the necessity of paying
tribute to Rome, and from many of the ordinances
emanating from there. They rebelled against the laws
of kings and the laws of the Church, and at the end of
the fifteenth century they had reached the stage at which
they were willing to pay the price of excommunication
from the Catholic Church, because by that time their
philosophical representatives had discovered a new way
to heaven via the Reformation.

It may help us to understand the confusion that
prevailed in philosophy during the scholastic period if
we remember that for some centuries certain nobles

THINKING SO

could at fain more power and influence by supporting the
king, others by supporting the ( Ihurch, mainly indii < ctl)
through supporting some other king, while the trading
class had been gradually rising; and that the sona ol

these people, or poor students for whom they found
money, had gone to the schools and carried with them
the mental reflection of the material interests of which
ever class or group they represented. The new
theological and anti-theological mentality of the
opponents of the Church, apparently unconnected with
material interests, was simply the indirect rationalisa
tion of those interests, and was accordingly governed by
the general material conditions of the period. Viewed
in this light, the philosophic confusion appears to be
merely the abstract general reflex of the material or
economic confusion between the older and the newer
tools or modes of wealth production, which produced
the merchants, the breakdown of manorial economy,
and the rise of the monetary system, and which brought
in its train new social relations requiring- corres-
pondingly new ideas of justice and right. We may also
add to these the individual or personal desires of the
disputants, an example of which may be found in Martin
Luther (1483— 1546), wdiosc famous doctrine, " man is
justified by faith alone," typified the desire to please
oneself about ordinances, penances, celibacy, etc. All
those things together formed the groundwork of the
Reformation, for in order to do what they felt they
must, if their interests were to be served, and which,
therefore, seemed to them to be right, it was necessary
to attack what, to them, was an intolerable religious
authority; but, being godly men, they were not prepared
to overthrow religion altogether, so what else could
they do but find fault with the existing religious doctrine
and reform it? The Reformation was merely the out-
ward result of their spiritual justification for doing what
economic forces had driven them to do. It marked tin-
downfall of Papal supremacy in many European
countries. Christian tradition had received a blow
from which it never recovered, and in consequence
Philosophy had much more freedom, not because the

60 THINKING

new churches were more tolerant, but because the
weight of ancient authority was gone. From that time
to the present Christianity has split itself into an ever-
increasing mass of contending ruins — the debris of a
faded mentality. The Catholic Church does, indeed,
maintain consistency amid its absurdity, but the rest are
absurd without even being consistent.

Now how was it with the other tradition — that of
Aristotle ? In 1453, a century before the death of
Luther, the Turks captured Constantinople; this made
an end of the Holy Roman Empire, but it also caused
Greek scholars to flee into Italy, and thus brought the
Greek versions of Aristotle within reach of French and
German students. They had now no need to rely on
Arabian and Latin translations, the works of Plato and
Aristotle could be read in the original, and so was
classical antiquity seen more clearly. Aristotle had
taught that the sun moved round the earth, and that it
was made of a material different from that of the earth;
that the earth was still and flat; also several other
doctrines which, to the men of the late fifteenth and the
early sixteenth centuries, seemed equally absurd. But
why had these doctrines become absurd ? To see
this we must glance at the scientific attainments
of the age.

In the Middle Ages the investigation of natural
phenomena had been neglected. There had, indeed,
been a few alchemists who aimed at making base metals
into gold, but in the thirteenth century the beginnings
of positive science may be seen in the ideas of Albertus
Magnus (1193 — 1280), a Dominican, and ROGER
BACON (1214— 1294), a Franciscan. Roger Bacon, a
monk of Oxford, thought that Aristotle's logic, which
took some statement as being true and then made deduc-
tions from it, was insufficient unless the statement or
premise from which the deductions were made had first
been established by the inductive method of observation
and experiment. This amounts to saying that deduction
is all right in its place, but its place is after its premises
have been established by reason first examining natural
phenomena, observing what takes place, and then

THINKING t.i

experimenting to verify the result, that is, to sec if the
same result will always follow from the same material
combinations. This method of searching for truth is
not based on reason only, but rather Is reason itself

based upon actual experiment with natural phenomena;
m attacked religion because it put experiment before
authority, and it attacked philosophy because it put
experiment before logic, so where previously there had
been a split between Theology (faith) and Philosophy
(reason or logic), there now came a split between
Philosophy and Science (experiment and verification)
concerning the proper method to use in searching for
truth. Roger Bacon and " the Blessed Albert,"
through their knowledge of nature, were regarded as
conjurors in the popular mind, but as dangerous
thinkers by their theological superiors. The inductive
method was employed with wider scope three centuries
after R. Bacon by FRANCIS BACON (1561—162I
London, for a time Lord Chancellor), who is known as
the father of English materialism, though it must he
remembered that these early materialists were not so
complete as they have been represented, their idea was
that by employing the inductive method of research they
might gain a better and more complete knowledge ol
Cod's purposes through understanding Cod's works in
nature. Bacon's method of starting from experienced
facts, both positive and negative, was not followed
entirely by succeeding students, nevertheless, it has had
a powerful influence; nor did he succeed in giving to
the world a complete philosophy of the whole range ol
natural phenomena, attempted in later days by C< >MTK
(1798 — 1857, of Montpellier, later Paris), and still later
by HERBERT SPENCER | [820—1903, of Derby); we
shall see the reason in Part II. So much for the method
of science, now — a few facts. At the end of the fifteenth
century Copernicus, a Polish mathematician, hail
taught, with great success, the older idea that not the
earth but the sun was the centre of our planetary
system, and that the earth was round and continually
moving, thus giving the lie to Aristotle. Columbus
had taken the rotundity as a fact in an endeavour to

62 THINKING

avoid Arab plunderers on the route to India, and had
discovered America in 1492. Vesalius, at no great
distance in the sixteenth century, had laid the basis of
modern anatomy, which again gave the lie to
Aristotelian speculations. William Gilbert, a little later,
founded the science of terrestrial magnetism, which
explained much that had hitherto been mysterious.
Hans Lippershey, in 1608, invented the telescope, which
was perfected by Galileo, who succeeded, by means of
it, in spoiling quite a number of ancient astronomical
ideas; he also discovered the isochronism of the
pendulum, and the laws of falling bodies, proving the
previous reasoning on those points to be definitely
wrong. Kepler, about the end of the sixteenth century,
formulated the laws of motion. Under the weight of
all this, what could happen to Aristotelian tradition but
that it should fall into the dust of a memory ? If we ask
why it was that Aristotle should have made such
serious mistakes, we may answer in a sentence,
that in Aristotle's time the tools had not been in
existence, which alone could bring about the newer
understanding.

We are now in a position to see how material develop-
ment undermined both Christian and Pagan traditions.
Philosophy had split into science on the one hand, and
a philosophy that was independent of theology on the
other; it left the supreme mind of God to theology, and
proceeded to an examination of the human mind.
Theology began to crack up in the interests of a
multiplication of religious forms, but its exponents did
not give up without a fight, they developed very vicious
tendencies before settling down to emulate the Lamb of
God. This latter may be seen in the incident of
Giordano Bruno, who, on the strength of the
Copernican theory of the sun being the centre of our
planetary system, had become a heresiarch by saying
that certain statements in the Bible were wrong. For
this the Inquisition, in 1600, had him tied to a stake in
Rome and publicly burnt alive. And we may also,
perhaps, be in a better position for understanding that
much quoted, but little understood, passage by Karl

THINKING

Marx — " In every historical epoch, the prevailing mode
of economic production and exchange, and the social
organisation necessary following from it, form the basis
upon which is built up, and from which alone can be
explained, the political and intellectual history of that
epoch."

Abstract from the Beginning. — In the first chapter
we saw that animal evolution resulted in the develop
ment or organs of sense, nerves and brains, and that
social evolution gave rise to an interpretation of the
mysterious, expressed in religious practices and
mythology founded on faith. In the second, that Greek
philosophers threw over tale-telling, studied nature,
developed philosophy, dialectics, logic and material
science; that logic led to scepticism, the decadence of
philosophy and a return to faith. In the third, that one
line of philosophy became extinct in ecstatic mysticism,
while the other became the servant of Christianity, the
remainder of Pagan culture coming through mainly in
the form of Aristotelian science. And in the present
chapter we get the two long lines of Pagan and Christian
tradition where, in the twelfth century conflict of the
two, Pagan logic does much to smash Christian
tradition, science helps to perform the same operation
on Pagan tradition, while underneath all are the
material developments that prepare the ground and
ultimately give rise to the modern scientific method of
enquiry which produces verifiable results, thereby
knocking both traditions to pieces. The Church and
the Bible had been infallible, but were found to be not
so. Aristotle had been infallible, but the new scientific
method of enquiry, plus the new tools and instruments,
had shown that not only was the intellectual world
moving, but also the very ground under their feet, while
the sun that moved daily across the sky was all the time
standing still. Old methods of wealth production, with
their attendant old philosophical speculations and old
religions, all had gone to pieces, their places being taken
by new methods and tools, reflected in new conceptions
oi literature, art, science, religion, law and philosophy;
it was the period of re-birth — the Renaissance.

64 THINKING

Was it any wonder that the Frenchman, Rene
Descartes, should decide never to believe anything
again until he had first tested it by the utmost doubt at
his command ?

CHAPTER V

Philosophy from Descartes to Kant

In passing to modern philosophy, which began in the
seventeenth century, it is important to remember that
its exponents were not only mathematicians, but were

also much influenced by the results of positive science,
though they did not, nor do their followers to-day,
apply the scientific method in their philosophical specula-
tions. So once more do we see that the tools and
instruments by which the scientific results are attained
have an indirect expression in philosophical thinking.

Seventeenth century philosophy may be said to have
begun on the materialist side with Francis Bacon, and
on the idealist side with DESCARTES (1596 — 1650, of
La Haye, in Touraine, later Paris; in Latin called
Cartesius), who cast all notions of ancient philosophy
on the scrap heap in order to make a new start; though
neither Bacon or Descartes were purely materialist or
purely idealist. Descartes began his enquiry by
systematically doubting everything, with, however, one
exception, for he found he could not doubt that he was
thinking. In the very act of thinking of himself as a
thinking being, he connected thinking, with himself as
the thinker, and realised that as a thinker he was far
from being perfect ; but since he could not imagine his
imperfect self except by comparing it with something
perfect (for the imperfect could only be conceived a^
being a lower degree of, or a declination from the idea
of complete perfection), he concluded that complete
perfection must exist somewhere. In the same way he
found from the fact that he himself was finite, that there
must be infinity ; and again, .since a perfect being that did

e 05

66 THINKING

not exist, except in thought, would be a contradiction,
for the reason that if it lacked reality it would be
imperfect, that being must be real; from all of which
he deduced the existence of a real and infinitely perfect
being or God (though not in the Christian sense).
This is known as the " ontological argument " for the
existence of God, and had been presented about five and
a half centuries before by Anselm, without, however,
attracting attention, because the Schoolmen had never
doubted the existence of something. This real and
infinitely perfect being, Descartes thought, if perfect
must be truthful, and since perfection in the highest
degree must be the source of all the lower degrees it
followed that man's ideas about the world, if true, were
derived from God.

At this point we might mention that Plato had used
the word " Idea " to indicate a thing that really existed
as an eternal and permanent nature, whether we
thought of it or not, and that later, Augustine had
taught that such eternal natures might be regarded as
thoughts in the mind of God ; but by the sixteenth
century the latter notion had been extended to mean
thoughts in the human mind also ; accordingly we now
use the word " idea" to mean a thought in the human
mind.

Now how did Descartes distinguish between true and
false ideas? Here again his Ontology served him.
because, he argued, if God is perfect and truthful, and
if man's knowledge of the world is got from his
knowledge of God, then his knowledge of the world
must also be true, and the world must be a real world
provided such knowledge is clear and distinct, that is,
not mixed up with doubtful speculations, for God,
being truth, could not deceive him in any way. Clear
and distinct notions were accordingly true but, which
were they? With Descartes they were those of
mathematics and mechanics, or extension and motion.
For example, we cannot conceive of a body without
some kind of shape that occupies space, or is extended
in space. And since all bodies occupying space are
capable of being separated into parts, modified or

THINKING

re-joined in various ways, all taking place tlr.
motion, and as mathematical and mechanical notions arc
the same wherever we meet them, they arc the only
clear and distinct notions, for all other ideas, such as
colour, warmth, etc., are perceived differently b)
different people. In this way the decks were cleared for
a mechanical conception of the physical uni .
TH( '.MAS HOBBES(i588 [679, of Malmesbury, Wilt-
shire; later Oxford and Paris), who was in touch with
Descartes, even thought that consciousness was a kind
of motion, but Descartes held the idea that conscious-
ness had no shape, did not occupy space and could not
be conceived of as being" mathematical; therefore, not
being a body, it could not have motion or have anything
to do with motion in the physical sense. Accordingly
he spoke of bodies or matter, and consciousness or
mind, as being substances exactly opposite to
other, for we could only conceive of them as each being
different and independent of the other. Mind and
matter, between which lies the greatest distinction in
all philosophy, were therefore by him considered to be
separate, and this, of course, raised once more the
eternal question of the connection between the two.
ilow, for example, could the mind by thinking of a
certain action make the material body perform that
action as, when asking a friend at table to pass the salt,
he does so? In dealing with the latter problem
Descartes, following mechanical principles, supposed
that the heart distilled from the finest particles of the
blood, a very fine fluid which was driven to the pineal
gland in the brain and there converted by that gland into
nervous energy, which passed along the nerves to the
muscles, thereby giving rise to motion; and as regards
the connection between mind and matter, he sup]
that the soul or mind of man directed that motion.
though it did not produce it. This, it will be seen, did
not explain how the direction took place, therefore his
explanation was no explanation at all, and the problem
remained unsolved.

I lie theory of Occasionalism taught by some
Cartesians (followers of Descartes) was that no .

68 THINKING

action ever took place, but both mind and matter were
actuated separately by God, and that on the occasion of
a man thinking to move his arm God caused the arm
to move. In short, that God caused parallel actions of
mind and matter.

NICOLE MALEBRANCHE (1638— 1715, of Paris)
held the idea that there were not three terms — God,
mind and matter, but only two — God (the only mind)
and matter (the world); and that when human beings
formed clear and distinct mental pictures of the world
around them, those thoughts were really parts of God's
thinking.

SPINOZA (1632 — 1677, of Amsterdam), a Jew, began
as a Cartesian, with accepting the separation of mind
and matter, but, through working at the problem of
their interdependence, afterwards developed the Pan-
theistic view. With him there was but one substance
in the universe, and that was God. What we called
" matter " was one part of God, and what we called
" mind " was the other part, or, in other words, mind
and matter were but two attributes of God. This
concept was a philosophical reflex of the times in which
mathematicians and physicists were establishing the
universal laws of motion and gravity as being common
to all things, regardless of species or particular
individuals, whether animals, men or machines. Now
the root question in philosophy is that of the unity
among individuals — how can many individuals be at the
same time one:'' Spinoza certainly made an attempt at
unity by making all three (God, matter and mind) into
one, but he only did so at the expense of the other end
of the question, that is, by destroying the idea of
individuality. It also destroyed the freedom of the will
and all Christian and Jewish notions of God; for the
latter he was excommunicated from the Jewish
fraternity.

However, LEIBNITZ (1646 — 1716, of Leipzig)
returned to the problem of individuality, and
asked, once more, what is an individual? He held
that an individual must be a unit in itself, that is,
not capable of being divided into parts; but as

THINKING

every particle of matter could be 10 divided to

infinity, real " unities " or " monads," as be called

them, could never he found in material bodies,
but only in souls, which have no parts, lie further
imagined that parts of the universe, other than man,
might have souls, though of a lower order than that of
man. and only to that extent could material things have
reality. Such unities, or monads, were the only things
that really existed, all else was illusion; they existed as
individuals apart from each other; the apparent inter-
communication between them was not really such, it
resembled Occasionalism, and consisted of a "pre-
established harmony " arranged by God, who is the
" final cause " of all.

So it would appear that from Descartes' time, mind
and matter gradually got more clearly separated, and
the problem of truth gradually became the problem of
how do human beings perform their thinking ?
Towards the solution of the latter question, JOHN
LOCKE (1632 — 1704, of Wrington, Somersetshire, later
Oxford and London), in 1690, contributed an " Essay
concerning Human Understanding." lie agreed with
Descartes that matter and mind owe their being to God,
for the simple reason that something cannot come from
nothing, and, therefore, something there must always
have been that possessed " power " and " knowledge."
But he differed from Descartes in that he was not so
sure that mind and matter were completely separated,
because God might have given matter the power to
think (Duns Scotus had the same thought about four
centuries earlier). That thought may excite motion he
considered as undeniable, though incomprehensible.
He agreed that minds were affected by external stimuli,
but, and this was his chief contribution, he believed th.it
there were no " innate " ideas— (ideas born in the mind
or created by the mind without aid from outside): he
thought that every idea must be the result of some
experience, and that experience was of two kinds-
sensation and reflection. The experience iluc to sensa-
tion was that got from outside the mind through the
organs of sense, while that due to reflection was the

70 THINKING

result of the mind reflecting " on its own operations
within itself," that is, experiencing its own thoughts, _

Leibnitz, in criticising Locke, pointed out that with
regard to reflection, what was reflected upon must be
in the mind before it could be experienced, and such a
thing could not be if there were no innate ideas, for as
far as the saying goes, "that there is nothing in the
understanding that was not first in the senses," one
exception must be made — the understanding itself.
With regard to sensation, he asked how could Locke
prove that the objects which caused us to have
sensations did actually exist outside us ? And how did
we get the idea of " cause," since nobody could ever
experience a cause by itself, apart from the other factors
involved; or how did we get the idea of bodies existing
on their own apart from anybody thinking about them,
seeing that experience of them was lacking?

Although Locke could not prove the existence of a
real material world outside the mind, yet he agreed with
the thinkers of his day in taking a real mathematical and
mechanical world for granted ; he further thought that
the bodies composing that world had primary qualities,
such as solidity, extension, shape, motion, rest, number,
etc. (all such as are mathematical or mechanical), and
that these gave rise to secondary qualities, such as
colour, sound, taste, etc., but that the latter were not
real on their own account ; and he had to explain in
some way or other how ideas of such unreal things could
arise from sensation, since that which affects the senses
must at least be real. He imagined that the ideas of
secondary qualities were due to the senses being affected
by minute and insensible parts of bodies (primary),
which parts themselves bore no resemblance to the
secondary qualities, but nevertheless produced the
effects of colour, warmth, and so on.

We may see how he came by the latter notion if we
bear in mind that Bacon had revived the idea of atoms,
after the manner of Democritus, and had been followed
in that by many other students in the field of natural
science. The theories based on atoms offered a better
groundwork for an explanation of natural processes,

THINKING 71

though at the same time they tended to do away with

the apparent solid reality of matter. So just as material
science had, during tin- Renaissance] tended to do

with theological explanations and the Supreme Mind, so
did atomistic chemistry tend to undermine the real*

matter itself, inasmuch as one could think of matter
being split up to infinity so that it could not he sense
perceived in any way.

Locke, as stated, had availed himself of the atomists1
way of looking at things, in order to account for ideas
of secondary qualities on the basis of sensation. If we
remember that, and also that the age was becoming
materialistic, we shall be in a better position to under-
stand why George Berkeley, a bishop, interested in
upholding the idea of spirituality, supported Locke's
teaching that knowledge is due to sensation, but
attacked his distinction between primary and secondary
qualities. The reason was because he thought Locke's
materialist and mechanistic arguments would, if carried
to their logical conclusion, result in smashing the very
materialism they were intended to support.

BERKELEY (1685— 1753, of Dysert, Kilkenny-
Bishop of Cloyne, in Ireland) allowed that knowledge
was derived from ideas of sensation, which idea .
course, were in the mind, but did not see the necessity for
anything outside the mind; in fact, did not see how we
could form a conception of any such thing, because what
was perceived was an idea in the mind, and an idea was
something different from the supposed object outside.
Nor could such an object, assuming there to be one,
think like our own minds, for it was precisely on that
basis that we distinguished between mind and matter.
Whatever could the object be? Locke had said that it
was something solid, heavy, etc, but not coloured or
heated; these secondary qualities being no more than
effects produced on the senses. But how, Berkeley
asked, could Locke know this? How could he tell that
ideas of primary qualities resembled objects while those
of secondary qualities did not, when the only contact
with the outside source of ideas was by means of the
ideas themselves? Again, if the nature of any outside

J2 THINKING

object was different from the nature of an idea (matter
different from mind), and ideas alone could be per-
ceived, how could an idea resemble it? And if it did,
how could we imagine it apart from the secondary
qualities of warmth, colour, etc., which Locke had said
it did not really possess ?

Berkeley concluded that outside objects did not exist.
In reply to Dr. Johnson's kicking a stone by way of
refuting that conclusion, he admitted everything to
which the senses bore witness, but denied that anything
existed apart from the actual sense perceptions; for the
very being or existence of all things that were perceived
lay in them being perceived. He therefore denied the
existence of matter. Asked what became of matter
when it was not being perceived, he replied, it did not
exist; because the idea of existence always meant
existence as an object of perception. To think of an
object unperceived was really thinking of it being
perceived, without the notion of a person perceiving it.

Now, such ideas as the last, which are framed at will,
namely, all kinds of suppositions, he called " ideas of
imagination." But ideas that did not depend upon our
willing, for example, those of gravity causing bodies to
fall or fire causing a burn, and so on, he called " ideas
of sense"; and as we could not produce such ideas at
will, and as matter did not exist, and therefore could not
produce them for us, ideas of sense, he thought, could
only be produced by a Spirit of a higher order than
ourselves (in so far as we produced ideas of imagination
we were spirits of a low order), who arranged what we
call the laws of nature (cause and effect, etc.), and
although it was impossible to discover any necessary
connection between those laws, nevertheless without
that supposition we should be in utter confusion; so he
considered it reasonable to think that the Great Spirit
arranged the connection which, as we came to under-
stand it through experience, might be regarded as the
language by which the Spirit communicated with us.
This was pure idealism.

Following Berkeley came DAVID HUME (171 1—
1776, of Edinburgh), who, while in France in 1739, wrote

THINK INC

a "Treatise of Human Nature." Hume said, ju
Berkeley treated matter as being nothing but percep-
tions, so ought we to treat Berkeley's Spirit also as
non-existent except in our perceptions, for we knew no
more of it apart from perceptions than we knew m
matter apart from perceptions. To say, as Berkeley
did, that proof of the existence of a superior Spirit was
to be found in the connection between perceptions of
cause and effect (the beautiful order in the universe)
only begged the question, for that so-called connection
was merely a habit of mind, the result of noticing that
certain kinds of perceptions always followed certain
other kinds; for even if certain ones did always follow
certain others, Hume thought this might just happen
so, the happening in no way proving the connection.
Since Hume's time the question of whether one thing
causes another, or whether the two just happen so
without being connected, has been known as the
problem of causality. So Hume was a complete sceptic
— no innate ideas, no mind or Spirit, no soul, no
external world or matter, nothing but perceptions which
nobody understood. Hume's fellow Scotsmen could
not stand that, so took to expounding the " principles
of common sense"; but their work merits very little
notice in an outline, where much detail must of necessity
be missed.

With the ship of philosophy in such a parlous state,
Immanuel Kant took the helm and sought to pilot it into
safe harbour. In effect, he said, away with the lot of
you, what we ought to do is to give up arriving at
dogmatic positions, everyone of which seems to be
knocked over by the next philosopher that happen^ t'>
come along; we ought to pay no attention to the truth
of the universe, the object of our study, until we first
understand the tool we are using— our reason; he there
fore turned away from the study of the universe itself,
in order to study those faculties of reason which are
employed in studying that universe.

Abstract. — After ancient ideas had failed to give
satisfaction, Descartes said, away with all dogma. He
began with doubt but ended with dogma. He saw that

74 THINKING

thought existed, and from that deduced the reality of
God, of the human mind and of matter. Spinoza did
away with the separate mind and matter, retained God,
the unity, but sacrificed individuality. Leibnitz restored
individuality of mind, but not of matter. Locke restored
individuality of both. Berkeley destroyed not only the
individuality of parts of matter, but the whole of matter,
and retained Spirit. Hume destroyed both Spirit and
matter, leaving only " perceptions," but knew nothing
definite about them; while the Scotch philosophers, out
of breath, returned to the "principles of common
sense." Through all this may be seen the gradual
forming, in a broad sense, of the two modern schools —
the idealists and the materialists, while the problem to
be solved became definitely that of how we do our
thinking, the solution of which was attempted by Kant.

CHAPTER VI
The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant

[MMANUEL KANT (1724—1804, of Konisberg)
was the first of those ( ierman philosophers who have
been called great. Though born in 1724. he did not
publish his first philosophical work till 1781 ; his
philosophy is accordingly late eighteenth century. In
this chapter we outline his three chief works — the three
Critiques.

When Hume had reduced the dogmas of previous
philosophers to scepticism, and had denied the cornier
tion between cause and effect bv saving that causes did
not exist except in our minds, Kant thought it high time
to cease dogmatising. He therefore attempted a
critical enquiry into the nature of our reasoning faculty,
for the purpose of finding out how far our reason was
capable of forming correct ideas.

It was Hume's problem of causality that led Kant to
his basic conception, which is that just as the movement
of the sun in the heavens is only an apparent motion
due to our way of looking at it, so are the positions and
shapes of bodies in space, and the succession of events
as they follow in time, only appearances due to the
peculiar nature of ouf perceiving faculties.

Hume had followed Locke in supposing there were no
innate ideas, that is, that the mind could produce no
ideas at all without the aid of experience, but Kant
thought the mind could produce such ideas, for
example, those of the mathematical kind, which cannot
be experienced for the simple reason that no such
exactness can be found in nature: therefore, according
to him, mathematical truths must be produced a priori,

75

76 THINKING

which means without experience, or prior to experience.
But since all knowledge, of whatever kind, must be
knowledge of something that is extended in space (that
has some sort of shape, and is therefore geometrical),
or knowledge of some event in time (which involves the
use of numbers in calculation), all knowledge must, to
that extent, be mathematical; so it follows that all
knowledge of the universe, or of its separate parts, must
be made up of two portions, the a priori ideas or
mathematical parts contributed by the mind itself
without the aid of experience, in addition to a posteriori
ideas, namely, those contributed through the experience
of our organs of sense.

Such knowledge is wholly in the mind, but not in
Berkeley's sense, because Kant held the view that ideas
in the mind were merely the mental pictures of how
things appeared to us, that is, they were only
appearances or phenomena, and since there could be no
appearance without something to appear, there must,
he thought, be a world of things outside our minds with
which we could never come face to face, nor could we
ever come face to face with our minds themselves, we
only knew the a priori ideas contained in them or
produced by them. Therefore the world of things
including our minds, though only in so far as our
experience could take us, was something real " in
itself," this he called a noumenon; but we could never
know that "thing in itself," for we could never get in
touch with anything beyond inside sense perceptions of
the things that were outside us (things in themselves),
in addition to the purely mental concepts of space and
time relating to those perceptions (and therefore limited
by them), namely, the mathematical parts of knowledge
which were produced by the mind itself. Accordingly
all understanding consists of the union of two kinds of
experienced phenomena, one supplied by sense percep-
tion, the other by the mind prior to its being
experienced.

Those parts of understanding supplied by the mind
Kant called "constitutive" notions, or categories,
because they arranged the sense perceptions into

THINKING 77

different categories or classes of knowledge, for
without such arrangement the sense perceptions would
not constitute knowledge. Were there no facult
understanding, perception could make nothing of what

was perceived, while, on the other hand, understanding,
without sense perceptions, would have nothin
understand. The sense perceptions wen- the variable
elements, while the constitutives or categories were the
constant elements (akin to Plato's Forms), and were
classed under four heads — Quality, Quantity, Relation
and Modality; these were the pure forms or "notions
of the understanding." For example, take the notion
of cause, which comes under the head of Relation, and
imagine that the senses supply the mind with the
perception of a blow being struck with a hammer, and
another perception of the sound which follows; there is
no separate perception of the blow causing the sound,
the mind supplies the latter part of the idea, and thereby
establishes a relation between the two perceptions,
enabling them to be understood. The notion of
Relation may, of course, be applied to thousands of
different and variable combinations of perceptions,
itself remaining the constant or invariable element
enabling us to understand those different combinations.
In this way Kant unified under one head or category
numerous dissimilar elements.

Understanding might be called reason in an 'unpurc
state, that is, mixed up with sense perceptions. To the
extent of this combination the external world, or
noumenon, including our minds, is real, even though we
never can get at it " in itself " ; but if our minds attempt
to transcend these limits, where, for the lack of
experienced sense perceptions no proper knowledj
possible, they go into the realm oi mere ideas without
any substantial backing, ideas which do not represent
reality; so, there being no sense perceptions to classify,
the notions are not constitutive, and not being any
longer connected with the physical are accordingly
metaphysical. Though in so far as such notions lead
us to acquire more experience, and consequent real
knowledge, so do they direct or regulate us; but since

5 5

THINKING

these "regulative" notions are wholly detached from
experienced sense perceptions] they constitute
apart from understanding; in other words, th<

tute " pure reason."

•• Can [que o] Pure Ri vs< »n " (1781 ).
as regulative ideas do not go beyond the 1
of a possible experience! they may lead ns to know

ledge whenever the experience should take place,
but reason without that experience can never produce
real knowledge. It is on this account that nietapi .
can never he a science; nevertheless pure reason cannot
help speculating metaphysically. That being so, since

constitutive notions of the Understanding have ahead;.
unified sense perceptions into different oi unity

(the different categories), pure reason now goes on to
imagine, first, a complete unity of all material things,
that is, a material universe, though the understanding,
for lack of complete experience, an never grasp it ;
second, a unity of all thoughts, sensations 1 . etc.,

in short, all mental things, or a soul, though again the
understanding- can never grasp it; and third, a still
higher unity of the first and the second, the
unity of all. which is God.

Owing to its nature, our reason cannot help raising
these prohlems, hut also owing to its nature it cannot
solve them. They are Kant's three "regulative"
Ideas, though this time not like Plato's, because they
lack that definite reality. They must not be confused
with Ontology, because even though pure reason cannot
think otherwise than that such unities exist, this 1-, no
proof that they do so exist apart from our thinkil
only proves that we think that way. As already said.
these ideas are not in the realm of knowl- they

can only be in that of faith, wherein Knnt said we have
sufficient grounds for acting as though isted

and that we have immortal souls and free wills;
sufficient grounds for treating those ideas as n
certainties, though not demonstrated certainties. But
since these moral certitudes are expressed in action.
reason ceases to be merely theoretical and becomes
piactical, so for Kant's explanation of why such

80 THINKING

should be treated as representing something morally
certain we must turn to his account of reason as applied
in practice.

" Critique of Practical Reason " (1788). Reason
as applied to practical affairs means that those affairs
are considered and judged, in virtue of which our
conduct is directed. Practical reason is, therefore, only
another name for the human will in action. Every
considered action is taken in reference to some scheme
of conduct, in answer to the questions, what shall I do
in this case, or in that? With regard to the different
individual cases, each has its own reason ; but when it
comes to doing one's duty, this applies to all men, even
though it be executed individually; and in Kant's
opinion this moral obligation to do one's duty is found
in the knowledge each one has of what is right, and
which requires obedience to what Kant called the
" categorical imperative." The latter may be described
as the imperious or commanding voice of conscience
which commands us to do what we know to be right,
irrespective of whether we like to or not.

Now why did philosophers pay so much attention to
morality ? When we remember that economic con-
ditions prior to the sixteenth century had produced the
Reformation and the consequent dethronement of the
Catholic Church as the source of direction in moral
conduct, and when we also remember that for another
two centuries the economic forces had brought into
prominence the new manufacturing class, with its own
ideas of what was right, as opposed to those of the
Nobility, a development that culminated in the French
Revolution of 1789, we can easily understand the type
of moral reflex which showed itself during this period.
Not knowing the roots of moral reflexes, they imagined
morality to be wholly a product of the mind, and, having
thrown the more extreme theologians with their
supreme mind overboard, had necessarily to attack the
problem themselves, for it would never do to leave the
world without moral guidance. It has even been
supposed that the newer type of thinking produced the
French Revolution. However that may be, and we

THINKING 8r

shall see later, during the seventeenth and eight
centuries there had been a .^reat number of boob

moral philosophy, wherein each writer tried to show the
basis of right action. Mobbes had made morality to a
threat extent synonymous with obedience to the 1 .
the State. Cudworth (1617 — (688) and Clark (l(
1729) said that true morality, like mathematics,
independent of the will of either God or man, it was
something true in itself. The third Marl of ShaftesbttT)
(1671 — 1713) and Francis Hutcheson (1694 — 1747. 1
Scottish professor) thought that morality turned upon
our possession of a natural capacity, a sentiment or
inward taste that enabled us to discriminate be:
good and bad. Hume (171 1—1776) agreed with the two
latter that morality depended upon sentiment rather
than reason, but added the idea of utility, so that
additional satisfaction was derived from having done
something useful. Adam Smith (1723 — 1790) thought
we ought to do what we would think other people ought
to do under similar circumstances in case we were
impartial spectators. Joseph Butler (1692 — 175-'.
Bishop of Durham) held to the " manifest authority " oi
conscience, tempered by a "reasonable self love,'
thought that duty to oneself ought to be considered as
well as duty to one's neighbour. Butler, along with
Richard Price (1723— 1791, a dissenting minister), were
more like Kant than the others, in that they made
reason rather than sentiment the basis of morality, hut
Kant differed more or less from each of the foregoing
by insisting on the unconditional aspect ot his
" categorical imperative."

As already explained, his " regulative notions " are
unconditioned by experience, because we never have
such experience, they are imaginary goals of knowledge
at which we aim; but he insists that there is a [
difference between the theoretical aspect of those
notions and the " categorical imperative " (the voi
conscience), which is also unconditioned, because the
latter brings us into relation with other human be
it is so strong and manifest throughout society that we
cannot get away from it; therefore it has a practical

F

82 THINKING

value over and above the merely theoretical aspect of
regulative notions, so that to do one's duty irrespective
of anything else is the highest of all human aims.
Aristotle had said knowledge was the highest goal.
Neoplatonists and Scholastics had thought it should be
the "beatific vision" (the ultimate union, or at least
communion with God). To Spinoza it was an
intellectual love of God. But though the tendency in
Germany in Kant's time was to look to knowledge as
the superior aim, Kant turned away from this because
it was only possible for the few, whereas the per-
formance of duty was within the reach of all (even the
ignorant peasant, whose " duty " was rapidly taking the
form of working for the rising capitalist class, because
with Kant, " what was right " meant what was right
for this class). He stuck to Reason as the basis of
morality to such an extent as to imply that one could be
sure that duty was the motive, only when that duty was
performed in defiance of personal interest and inclina-
tion; he also implied that a duty that was at the same
time a pleasure could not be performed from a purely
right motive. In nothing was he more insistent than
that in our moral judgments it was not feeling or
emotion, but solely the principle of reason, that was
active. Moreover, it was an individual affair, for if a
man did not obey his own conscience his acts were not
truly moral, and, since it was as a reasoning being that
he made his decision, so did it become necessary to treat
other people as being also capable of that reason which
implies the necessary freedom for its exercise, because
in being aware of the moral law, so is every individual
aware also that his will seems to be free; for when he
knows he ought to do certain things, he has no doubt
that he can both " will " them and do them. From this
follows, first, the idea of individual freedom; second,
that we recognise the equal freedom of other reasoning
beings; and third, the idea of a community of such
beings bound together by the consciousness of their
obligation to keep the same law.

We have now reached the philosophical expression,
or reflex, of those material developments (obtaining in

THINKING

other countries besides France) thai brought about the
French Revolution, and it should be interesting to

notice also the close parallel between the philosophic
and the political forms of thinking arising from the same

conditions.

PHILOSOPHIC. J'< iLl i tCA] .

i. Free will for the individual, I. Liberty. | ;,.,

2. E ree will for others also, 2. Equality. u] tkr t ■

3. Community among such free wills. 3. Fraternity. J "■**"•

So, Kant would argue, the freedom of the will is

implied by morality, and morality appeals to be in
ohedience to the imperious command oi reason. Bui
since the will precedes action, it cannot be experienced
by the senses, only the results can be so experienced;
and since there can be no knowledge apart from
experience, it follows that we can never be positive that
we have free wills while all the time we are compelled to
act as though we have. He deal) similarly with
Immortality and God, for we are compelled to go on in
a seemingly continual advance towards an ideal which
we can never imagine ourselves as attaining (the ideal
perfection of the Soul), and also we are compelled to
imagine a ruler of the world, in whose government <n
it morality is the chief consideration. But though there
is no proof of either God, Freedom or Immortality,
neither is there disproof; they remain objects of faith.
The sufficient grounds for belief Kant found in the
thought that without such faith our whole moral life
would have no meaning. Therefore, the "categorical
imperative " in the every-day life of all men, as
compared with the pursuit of knowledge by the lew,
distinguishes the moral or " practical " side of a
" regulative " idea, which compels as i<> obey, from the
speculative or " theoretical " side, which merely directs
our endeavour to acquire knowledge.

"Critique ok the Faculty of Judgmi __ In

addition to the phenomena already considered, kant
dealt with two other kinds— beauty and adaptation,
concerning which his thought ran along the following

84 THINKING

lines. When thinking- of the beauty of an object
in nature, we cannot avoid considering it as the
work of an intelligence, though greater than that of any
human being, much in the same way that when admiring
a beautiful statue we think of the intelligence of the
artist who produced it. Or, with regard to adaptation,
v/e may think of the intelligence of the draughtsman
who designs a machine, the parts of which are adapted
to each other, in virtue of which they all function as one
whole; but in considering the human body with its
wonderful adaptation of parts, such that no human
mechanic could ever devise or even explain satisfactorily
on mechanical lines, we again cannot avoid thinking of
such an organism as being the work of an intelligence
greater than our own. At first sight this looks like
Anaxagoras' or Aristotle's "teleology," but it is not,
for though we cannot explain such things without the
supposition of a superhuman "will," we are not
justified in going the length of saying they could not
have come into existence without that " will " or
"design"; because even though the supposition is
necessary, we must not forget that they are only
appearances, and consequently we cannot know the
cause "in itself," for we never get in touch with it,
and so can never claim definite knowledge of it.

Abstract.— Descartes had separated the Supreme
Mind from matter and had then built an ontological
bridge across the gulf. Kant destroyed that dogmatic
bridge, but left a bridge of faith in things that could
neither be proved or disproved. For Kant, there is a
real mind, which knows only its own appearances, along
with the appearances of a world, which also is real, but
it can never know either itself or that real world as they
are " in themselves." This real mind operates with
sense perceptions of phenomena on the one hand, and
its own a priori notions which are applicable to those
sense perceptions on the other; to this extent it under-
stands. Outside this limited experience the mind
operates with its own pure reason, which, for the lack
of sense-perceived phenomena, can never reach positive
knowledge or what he calls understanding. Reason, in

THINKING 85

its pure state, consists of theoretical or metaphj

speculation. Reason, when applied in practit

the form of morality on the one hand, and certain

• 5 of jud "ii the ether ; 11 for both

(free will and an intelligent designer of the univ<
being taken on faith, while the basis for faith itself is
found in the necessity for men to live a moral life.
Kant did not arrive at unity like his pred ; he-

was a dualist, because he believed in a world ol
appearances or phenomena, and also in a world or
noumenon that lay for ever at the hack of phenomena,
and which constituted the " thing in it-elf." Descartes
and his followers gradually brought about the modern
distinction between mind and matter. Kant n
both, but left the problem of their ultimate nature
(nonmena) alone. He turned his attention to the
faculty of reason (phenomena), which at this point
includes understanding, and so opened the way to the
problem of thinking or understanding considered apart
from the things that had to be thought about or under
stood. He did not solve the problem of understanding,
but made a remarkable contribution towards formula-
ting it correctly. The problem is not how do we
understand other things, but how to understand the
understanding itself. The latter question settled, the
former disappears.

CHAPTER VII
Idealism from Kant to Bergson

Prior to Kant's time there had been growing up the
doctrine that human reason should be the guide in all
matters; that if man would cease to trust in theological
dogma and rely on himself he wrould not go astray, for
if things are logical to the mind they must be real in
nature, and therefore reason must be the faculty by
which man discovers truth. This is Rationalism. But
Kant gave the deathblow to rationalism by showing
that reason by itself could never produce knowledge,
because it lacked experience ; and surely this was amply
shown in the philosophical strife we have already seen.
Kant thereby showed that metaphysics was impossible
as a science. On the other hand, particularly in France,
there had also been growing up a narrow mechanical
materialism, which attempted to explain all mental
processes from the interaction of ponderable matter, a
doctrine that, of course, left no opening for faith in the
supernatural. But Kant refuted this as well, by
teaching that reason alone could produce " regulative "
notions amounting to moral certainties, namely, those
of God, Immortality and Freedom. So faith, with its
cardinal principle of freedom, was reinstated. This
shows Kant to be the philosopher of the rising
manufacturing or middle class, the Liberals or the
bourgeoisie, as they are called, who required freedom
from the power of the landlord class.

Kant's influence was so great that the philosophy
which preceded him fell into the background, at least in
Germany, and his doctrine that understanding can never
know the " thing in itself," while all the time it is

86

THINKING

limited by it, underlay the work of many who succeeded

him, for example, Comte, who limited human science
to exttmal phenomena, and this only within the

system, thus excluding the science of mind —
psychology, and the science of the stars- sidereal
astronomy. It also underlay the theory of the " rela-
tivity of knowledge " taught by Sir \V. Hamilton |

[856, of Glasgow, later Edinburgh University) and
H. L. Mansel (1820 — 1871, of Cosgrove, Northampton-
shire, Dean of St. Paul's); and in a different way by
Herbert Spencer, who insisted on the limitations of
knowledge in order to leave no room for faith in super
natural revelation. These relativists did not relv so
much upon the nature of our thinking faculties, as upon
the fact that all knowledge must consist in n relation
between a mind which knows and some object which is
known; in other words, a " subject " and an " object."
Of course, the existence or recognition of this relation
does not do away with the question of whether a thing
as it appears to us differs from the "thing in itself"
apart from our sense perceptions, and Kant was not
without opponents concerning his dualism of noumenon
and phenomena. One line of thinker*, who developed
the more modern forms of idealism, sprang from that
side of Kant which dealt with phenomena, and for the
present we are concerned with explaining the chief
points in that development.

JOHANX GOTLIEB FICHTE (1762—1814, of
Rammenau, Jena, and Berlin) thought there was no
need to trouble about a "thing in itself.'* In his
opinion there was only one thing, rind that was
mind, which, so to speak, divided itself into two in
order that the subject, the part that knows, might
have an object to think about; hut this was not
an individual mind, it was the mind of the world,
or mind in general. Berkelev thought that so called
external objects were only ideas of individual spirits,
but Fichte conceived the notion that nit th:t existed
consisted of one total mind, which included all the
things we know, as well as that which knows them. It
was' an "absolute self." But he, like others, iras

88 THINKING

troubled with the question of morality, and concluded
that this total mind split itself in two, in order that one
part, that which knows, judges and decides, might use
the other part, usually called nature, as an obstacle to be
overcome so that the first part could demonstrate its
moral character by performing the duty of overcoming
nature. He also thought that the second part, or
nature, acted as a means of communication between
individuals, for the total mind included many individual
selves, so that each could practice morality in executing
duties to others. With Fichte this complete moral
order constituted an "absolute self," which might be
called God, and to him there was no other God. His
" absolute " was the complete unity of so-called matter
and so-called mind, and was limited to what was " in
relation," that is, as between knower and known, or
subject and object; but it was all mind, there was no
matter in itself, the part called matter was regarded as
subordinate, and only existed for the other part called
mind to plav upon.

FRIEDR'ICH WILHELM JOSEPH von SCHEL-
LING (1775 — 1854, of Leonberg, in Wiirtemburg,
and Universities of Jena, Munich, Berlin, etc.)
differed from Fichte in that he thought of an ultimate
reality which underlay both mind and so-called matter,
though without any definite character of its own;
Ave never got face to face with it, but knew of it
by a kind of intuition. He further thought that
nature was not subordinate to mind, that is, utilised
by the mind for itself to practice morality, because
the beauty and design to be found in nature indicated
that it was something more than a mere object
on which to practice. He therefore conceived the
existence of an "absolute something," which, though
underlying the relation between that which knows and
that which is known, was really outside the relation;
that it had an independent reality of its own. Where
Fichte's "absolute" consisted of the moral order
involved in the relation between knower and known,
Schilling's was something wider, a weird kind of God
lying outside mind and matter, though permeating both.

THINKING

Since mind and matter were both mental, Schedule's
WOrk was really an attempt to COnstrtld a trinity with
the human mind a> the basis, and arose from the
struggle invoked in explaining matter in terms of mind.

Schelling was followed by GEORG WILHELM
FRIEDRlCH HEGEL (1770 1831, of Stutl
Jena and Berlin), who thought that Schelhng's
"absolute" was altogether too vague. It took no
notice of the connection between mind and m
which comes into play when we are reflecting about
so-called material things, which reflection is the
common experience of everybody. He thought that
in ordinary daily reflection and discussion, men were
actually engaged in tracing out the structure of
what he called the Absolute Tdca. With Hegel the
Absolute is not something in the background, except
that part of it that has not yet been discovered; on the
contrary, its very being is in the manifestations of the
life and movement of mind and so-called matter. This
complete and permanent Idea had existed from all
eternity and as men struggled with their problems.
found themselves in contradictions, discovered new
knowledge which! explained or solved the contradic-
tions, and in this way kept advancing, so were they ever
more and more coming to a knowledge of the complete
Idea, the Absolute.

Hegel agreed that the mind in its advancing required
a so-called material world with which it could strive,
but that material world was with him only another part
of the Idea, in other words, it was mental; all the
advancing, then, consisted of the Idea gradually
unfolding itself, and was, in fact, simply the evolution
of the Idea. This evolution, which appeared in our
minds as a kind of argument in which conflicting state-
ments were ultimately reconciled in a conclusion, was a
revival of dialectics. In it our whole life appears to be
constantly changing, so that every conclusion in the
argument is but a new starting point in another
argument that is to end in a still higher conclusion, and
so are we ever attaining greater and greater unity,
more and more truth.

90 THINKING

But how are we to recognise truth or reality at any
given time amid all this change ? Kant had said that
the mathematical parts of knowledge existed in the
mind, but not in the things. Hegel asked how could
that be ? If truth were not in the things, then all our
science is illusion; for example, gravity and the laws of
motion. Rather is it that the thing which appears is
the reality itself appearing and not something else; and
further, if this appearance seems to be reasonable or
rational, consistent or logical, it must be real, and being
real must be rational, for how could we understand what
is not real? How shall we know the real and true,
except by the fact that it is intelligible, understandable,
rational, reasonable, logical, consistent? Hegel's test
of truth, therefore, is that which is reasonable and
logical to the mind; for example, to test whether or not
our writing desks are real we must touch them, because
it is reasonable to test such things by the senses, but to
test whether the Idea (God) is real or not, it is reason-
able to rely on the " ontological argument," but
unreasonable to submit such an idea of intelligibility to
the senses; therefore, the truth of all things may be
brought to light by putting reasonable questions to
oneself or to other people, and as different conclusions
are arrived at by this reasoning process, so are we
tracing out bit by bit the structure of reality, which is
God or the Absolute, and there is no other Absolute.

This method of enquiry, as stated, is dialectic,
because it takes the form of an argument, whereby we
may find truth at any given time amid a constant -flow
of historical development. In applying it Hegel had at
his command a much wider knowledge of history than
had Plato, consequently the dialectic in his hands came
to be of great significance as a method of interpreting
history; it constituted his great contribution to modern
progress in scientific thinking, for by means of it he
propounded the nature of the problem to be solved,
namely, the discovery of the law underlying the changes
which have taken place in history, or, in short, the law
of human progress, and also the method of solving it.
He fell short, however, in the actual solution.

THINKING 91

Since the dialectic method deals with a constant How
from one thing to another, or, rather, the evolution of
one thing out of that which preceded it, it must, of
course, consider the relation hetwecn opposite tonus of
a contradiction. In the realm of morality it takes into
account not only Kant's " categorical imperative." or
what ought to he, hut also what U when it might seem
to contradict what ought to he. For example, starting
from the thought that man has a free will, how can we
justify the idea of law, which is the negation or
contradiction of freedom? First take the idea that a
man is free to do what he likes with his property. When
this man enters into relations with other similarly free
men, each has to recognise the rights of the others,
consequently personal freedom, which was real and
true originally, gets curtailed by the rise of a reasonable
moral law, which, because reasonable, nozv becomes
real, while absolute personal freedom becomes unreal
or untrue. This greater unity we may assume, in the
first place, to take the form of the family, then, with
further development, a wider form in social groups of
many families, and a still wider form in the State, until,
in the end, the mind finds itself in its highest stage,
which is realised, not only in the idea of the State, hut
also that of the Monarchy; so that as society develops,
personal freedom, which at one time was reasonable,
and therefore real or true, becomes at a later sta^e
unreasonable or unreal, and no longer true. In this
way, through reconciling the contradictions by com-
bining all the historical factors, Hegel proves that,
taken altogether, what is, at any given time, is what
ought to he, and if it ought to be, then it is reasonable
and accordingly real.

To Hegel the continual change which has taken place
throughout history, and is still taking place, is not hint;
less than the dialectic being acted. It is the Idea
unfolding itself in its march towards its complete
unfolding — the Absolute Idea, and only in such a way
could the unfolding take place. (This talking of an
absolute end alongside perpetual ehangc is a contradic-
tion that is unreconcilable.) It appears as a conflict

92 THINKING

between the wills of different men or groups of men
who argue or contend for their particular parts of
reality. They each get their corners rubbed off, and out
of the contradictory parts comes a reconciliation which
is seen by most people to be reasonable, it is therefore
real because it is intelligible, logical or consistent.
However, later, new contradictions arise, followed by
different reconciliations, and of course a different
reality; so the older reality is no longer reasonable and
becomes unreal, its place being occupied by the newly
and more widely reasonable. It must be remembered
that all this takes place in the mind, the so-called
material world is only a sort of image in the mind of
that part of the Absolute Idea which appears as nature
in order that the complete mind shall carry out its
destiny. Therefore, reality or truth is constantly chang-
ing, what is true at one time is untrue at another,
because mind has advanced in the meantime and dis-
covered an additional part of absolute truth which
modifies the previous reality and therefore negates it;
a still further advance would in like manner negate the
previous negation, and so on and on continually until the
complete Idea has been unfolded, but meanwhile what
is at any given moment is what ought to be. Is it
any wonder the tyrannical Prussian Government of
Hegel's day welcomed such a comforting philosophy?

Just as Kant's doctrine of freedom was the philosophy
of the middle class since it voiced their need for " liberty,
equality and fraternity," so, thirty years later, Hegel's
doctrine that " what is, is what ought to be " was
simply a philosophical expression of the same material
conditions when the middle class had got what they
wanted and were crying halt; but to get the full force
of this it is necessary to remember that prior to the
French Revolution of 1789, the Liberals, or manufactur-
ing element, needed freedom from the restrictions
imposed on them by the landed nobility, though they
were not powerful enough to get it without the aid of
the lower class of working people. At the time of the
Revolution the two classes (middle class and working
class) had carried all before them, the working class

Tin X K I 93

thought they had conquered liberty, and so they had,

hut not for themselves, for as soon as the nobility were

overthrown and their power broken, the middle

had got all the freedom they required and had no wish

to share it with the working class. They, the middle
class, were to be the new master class, it was therefore
dangerous to allow liberty to the working class whom
they were to exploit. The march towards liberty had
gone far enough for them, so they called a halt and
eventually restored the Monarchy, though in a limited
form. Hegel's doctrine, then, was a mental refle
the period of restoration, while that of Kant represented
the period of attack. Kant's was a war cry for freedom,
Hegel's was a hymn of thanksgiving that things had
reached a settled state. But here came the contradiction
that ruined Hegel's philosophy, for his method was
dialectic (changing), his system static (settled).

I tegel's philosophy had a short but brilliant run. His
followers ultimately split into two camps. The right
wing clung to the static side, believing that " wh
is what ought to be "; this, we have seen, was pleasing
to the Prussian Government. But that same Govern-
ment's " unjust " taxation, harsh laws and refusal to
allow to the German middle class any democratic voice
in government, led to the formation of the left wing,
known as the Young Hegelians. The left wing accepted
the dialectical part of Hegel but rejected the static, and
in the hands of Marx and Engels, who sprang from the
Young Hegelians, and later, Dietzgen, the dialectical
view led for the first time to scientific results in
thinking, because it constituted the method employed,
or rather the view taken, in building up the science of
society.

Meanwhile there were wars, misery and seemingly
nothing but angry contention. When all the philosophers
one after the other had tried to solve the question of
what was moral, right, just, etc., it appeared that
things were worse than ever. This was the state
of affairs that gained a hearing for ARTHUR
SCHOPENHAUER (1788— 1860, of Dantzig, Berlin
and Frankfort (in .Main), who, like He k his

94 THINKING

root notion of the human will from Kant. But
while Hegel thought the will was merely the
means by which the mind struggled with nature and
found out the real good in the Idea, Schopenhauer
thought it was the only thing that existed; but, in order
to express itself, it divided itself into " will " (the reality
that strives to attain its desires) on the one hand, and
" knowledge " (its own creation) on the other. The will,
he thought, employed knowledge for the mere purpose
of expressing its own desire as " the will to live." But
he further thought the will was essentially bad) and the
only good that came out of all the striving was that the
reason ultimately became aware that complete satisfac-
tion cannot be attained, and therefore the best thing to
do is to give up striving, to renounce all interest in any
satisfaction to be got in life, and to calmly await death.
It reminds one of certain aspects of Buddhism and
Theosophy.

However, the material conditions still continued to
throw up their mental reflexes. After the German and
French Revolutions of 1848 and 1852, capital was
producing wealth, vice and luxury at the top of society,
and poverty, vice and misery at the bottom; little men
here and tnere were struggling to become capitalists,
small capitalists struggling to become greater capitalists
while the great ones had already entered on the
struggle to determine which particular group should
become world dominant; it was more than ever
the era of competitive struggle resulting from
the enormously-increased machine production and
the consequent cross investments of capital tending
towards the unification of ownership of tools and
materials. The better tools caused an overproduction
of certain classes of goods and led to fierce international
competition for markets. All this fierce struggle
was expressed philosophically by FRIEDRICH
NIETZSCHE (1844 — 1900, of Rocken and Basel) who
imagined that those who resigned themselves to their
fate deserved nothing better, for the human "will to
live," if rightly understood, was not a bad thing, but,
on the contrary, the best thing we possessed; and far

THINKING

from despondently waiting for death, we ought to be
continually working with might and main to develop
those dominant qualities whereby In the struggle
existence more vigorous races would be produced, men

who would be as far above the men of today as the
latter are ahove the beasts; this became known as the

doctrine of the Superman. Here, again, the advance oi
science was reflected in philosophy, for in 1859 Darwin
had published the results of his biological researches in

which he expounded his doctrine of the " origin ol
species " by "natural selection " and "the survival ol
the fittest."

I luring the century preceding Nietzsche's philosophy,
Kant and his German followers, as already stated, had
treated the mind as capable of producing ideas without
the aid of the senses, but it took a long time for this to
affect English thought. Englishmen for a couple o!
centuries had been materialists, developing in the main
along the lines laid down by Bacon, Hobbes and Locke,
namely, that truth was to In- sought by Studying nature,
and that ideas could not be produced except by means
of sensation. They sought to account for ideas by the
same method as that used in explaining nature, and
treated ideas as being made up, so 1 < * speak, of mental
atoms. They tried to explain mental work as the
"association of ideas," and sought to find the la..
that association. For example, Hume explained the
notion of a cause as being composed of, or built up
from, often repeated associations of a particular
kind. These men were known as the " LMI'IKICAL
PSYCHOLOGISTS" and include David llartly
(1705 — 1757. of Halifax 1, lames Mill (1773 [836,

01 Xorthwater Bridge, in Forfarshire, later London 1,
John Stuart Mill (1806 [873, of London, son of lames
Mill), and Alexander Bain 1 [818 [QM, Prof, of I
at Aberdeen). Between Hartly and I. Mill there \tere
Thomas Reid (1710- 1796, oi St radian, Kincardine-
shire; succeeded Adam Smith in Glasgow as Moral
Philosopher) and Dugald Stewart (175$— 1828, of
Edinburgh), who founded the Scottish school, of which
Sir \V. Hamilton was a leading light; the general

96 THINKING

feature of this school was a confidence in common-
sense and intuitive convictions, which made them
opponents of all forms of philosophic scepticism.

If we remember that philosophers had thrown
theological direction in moral matters overboard and
were still searching for the origin of morality in the
human mind, we shall see it to be only natural that
those who tried to explain all forms of thought as being
due to sensation should attempt to explain morality as
arising from a combination of the feelings of pleasure
and pain; and in this way arose the school of Utili-
tarianism represented by JEREMY BENTHAM (1747
—1832, of London) and JOHN S. MILL. When asked
to explain the idea of " virture for its own sake" on
the basis of utilitarianism, they thought it arose from the
" association of ideas " wherein a man who had learned
by experience that he got most pleasure by being
virtuous, gradually got into the habit of being virtuous,
so that the practice of virtue, which originally had been
only a means of attaining pleasure, eventually came to
be the end in view. However, this is a view developed
from the standpoint of an individual, it does not explain
that conviction which most people have of there being
a "right" which is right for everybody; nor does it
explain the so-called universal mathematical truths.
Herbert Spencer suggested that the latter ideas might
be accounted for by assuming that our ancestors had
had the experience necessary to form the ideas, and
that our inherent convictions had been handed down
to us through heredity; but this was no explanation,
for whichever way we look at it, no amount of
individual experience, however far back, could account
for what is absolutely and universally true, because no
individual could ever experience something that is
universal.

By degrees, however, English sensationalism came to
be influenced by German idealism. THOMAS HILL
GREEN (1836— 1882, of Birkin, in Yorkshire, and
Oxford University), who pointed out that Hume had
long ago reduced the sensation theory to scepticism,
was a student of Kant and Hegel; he called attention to

THINKING 97

the fact that the objects of natural science which

outside the mind could not be reduced to a combination
of feelings; nor could a common or universal " good "
or "happiness" or "right" be understood by indi-
viduals as being composed of their feelings in total since
their feelings were only momentary. Therefore, he
argued, there must be, in addition to the objects outside
the mind, a permanent mind to remember those feelings,
and also, this mind must be capable of knowing what is
always and everywhere true, it must be a univi
mind, or God, of which individual minds were so-called
reproductions. Others, not taking into consideration
that the mind is always engaged in seeking unity,
thought the universal mind was nothing but an
abstraction, so they held that only individual minds
need be considered. WILLIAM JAMES (1N42— 1910,
Prof, of Phil, at Harvard) taught a theory known as
" pragmatism," based on the independence of individual
minds and their ability to arrive at truth by finding out
what is practicable in relation to individual interests.
Altogether, an idealist strain gradually permeated
English materialism, but in the latter part of the nine-
teenth century there were reversions which showed
themselves in what has been called " realism," though
with a different meaning as compared with the realism
of the Scholastics.

Realism, a reflex of German materialism, is really a
dualism of matter and force, of which we shall
see more in the next chapter. This dualism, added
to the doctrine of evolution, found expression in
HKkBERT SPENCER'S "Synthetic Philosophy,"
wherein he attempted to show by the " persistence
of force" the evolution from atoms to societies.
The concept of biological evolution when applied t < »
society, treats society as a biological organism and
directs philosophic thought towards the study of
the biological principle of " life," as expressed in the
evolution of society; the ever-present " urge " which
drives society onward. George Bernard Shaw calls this
"urge" the "life force." Since this active living
principle appears to operate whether we are conscious

G

98 THINKING

of it or not, there arise the questions of its relation to
consciousness on the one hand and to mere mechanism
on the other; these questions lie at the root of modern
psychology, they are the two parts of our old question
as to the connection between mind and matter, because
" life " is here treated as an entity expressing itself
partly in mind and partly in matter. As far as philosophy
is concerned, the whole thing put simply means that
philosophers have definitely dropped the word " God "
and substituted that of " Life," but they are still where
they were.

On the idealist side, the final outburst, up to date,
comes from HENRI BERGSON (Prof, at the College
of France). With Bergson, truth is the life which
pervades the universe, or, rather, which is the universe.
It consists of that general consciousness or intuition, of
which instinct (as in bees and ants) is a more highly-
concentrated form, while intellect (as in man), which
has evolved along a different line, is the most highly
concentrated. Its essence is an eternally-changing now,
an absolute time duration which we apprehend in
intuition. This intuitive duration is identical with being
or existence, for we know intuitively that we are living
and this life or reality is nothing but movement, a move-
ment of pure time. Matter is an illusion produced by
part of the total movement taking place in a reverse
direction to other currents, thus giving to these time
currents the appearance of material objects. Material
objects are, therefore, nothing but the obstacles that
each current presents to the other just at the points
where the now is becoming the future. This conception,
of matter being, by illusion, the materialised impact of
two time currents, is a reflex of the electron theory,
wherein matter is materialised energy resulting from the
impact of two electric forces that reduce each other to
inertia, the electron, the base of ponderable matter,
being the point of electrical inertia. In Bergson's
working out, the different parts of consciousness act
upon and therefore condition each other; so, considered
as parts, are not free, but, when taken altogether are
conditioned only by their own internal character, and

THINKINi

consequently have a freedom. This freedom holds alike
for a whole individual or the whole of life. There!
when we acl intuitively (is a whole we act fr< ich an

act is a creative act and it i> such acts thai constitute the
evolutionary process. Creative evolution is ac
the free surging onward of some part of univei sal "life
or Spirit overcoming some other part. B does

not offer a reconciliation of mind and matter, but rather
a new view wherein the question of dualism
arise, since they are both one life pi oce - -. 1 1 i followers
call this reality " mind," not because it is ethereal as
contrasted with gross matter, but because it is the
active, living, intelligent principle of existence. In
expounding this philosophy, Bergson becomes the
modern mystic, his intuitive surging creation being a
close parallel to the ecstacy of Plotinus.

Excluding minor differences, it should be plain that
modern philosophy runs very nearly the same course
as ancient philosophy; for when the Milesians with
" open " minds started investigations which gav<
to problems of ultimate reality, philosophy developed its
" great men," its sophists and sceptics, its dialectics, its
atoms, its questions of morality wherein Epicureans
based conduct upon pleasure, the Sceptics upon the
common-sense of their day, the Stoics sinking bark
into faith while the Neoplatonists fizzled out in a
state of ecstatic supernatural mysticism ; and -
similar manner did modern philosophy begin with
Descartes' investigations based on doubt, followed
by the permanent natures of God, the scepticism
of Hume, the materialism based on atomic science,
the utilitarianism of Mill based on pleasure, the prior
return to faith by Kant, the dialectics of Hegel, only in
the end to fizzle out in the idealistic mysticism of the
natural, as in Bergson and Shaw. And so must it always
be, that those who start from mind without authority,
end in mysticism; while those who start from mind
along with authority, end in faith.

Mas it been without results? No, not quite. Kant
cleared the problem by showing it to be one of thinking,
Hegel applied the dialectic method to a wide know led c

ioo THINKING

of history, but to see how this in the hands of Marx led
to the solution of the problem of thinking, it will be
necessary to go back to the seventeenth century in order
to follow modern philosophy through the development
of its materialist aspects.

( II AM kk \ II!
Materialism from Roger Bacon to Marx

(Although some of the following points have already
been mentioned in connection with other phases of the
story, they are repeated in this chapter for the sake of
completeness. )

Philosophic materialism originally presented itself
in the form of natural philosophy, which later tame to
be called natural science. Positive science, in so far as
any beginning can be assigned to it. appeared with
ROGER BACON (1214 — 1294). It ha^ been assigned
to R. Bacon, notwithstanding that there had been many
natural philosophers before him, because prior to his
time it had been the custom in solving problems to rely
for results on a process of deductive reasoning, after
the manner of Aristotle. Deduction consists in taking
some statement as being true and then deducing
conclusions from it, but R. Bacon thought that such a
method was not sufficient in itself and that we ought
to take great care in establishing the firsl statement,
or premise, for if that were false so would the conclusion
be false however perfect our logic. His method was,
therefore, to base all his firsl statements on obst
facts, about which he formed opinions, then by
deduction argued what oughl to follow and finally t<
his conclusions by experimenting t<> see it those con
elusions did actually follow. This method we see at a
glance to be the correct one because it tests Hie results
obtained, which, if found not to agree with the first
opinion, leads to a modification of that opinion. It
consists of observation and experiment, is called
the inductive method, and, along with the material
investigated, forms the groundwork of all science.

101

102 THINKING

DUNS SCOTUS (1274— 1308), the British School-
man and contemporary of R. Bacon, asked "Is it not
possible for matter to think?" In this he made
theology preach materialism by supposing that God
could have produced such a miracle had he wished. He
was, we remember, partly a nominalist, and nominalism
which arose from natural philosophy was the first form
of materialism.

Three centuries later FRANCIS BACON (1561— -
1626) applied the inductive method more widely in
natural philosophy, so that, although not the originator
of the method, as is sometimes said, he was, neverthe-
less, the starting point of English materialism. He
sought by observation and experiment in relation to
natural objects to explain the works of God. Bacon,
therefore, never escaped from theistic prejudice, even
though he thought that all knowledge was based on the
experience of the senses. His basis was accordingly
matter, but his conclusions were vitiated by a
theological bias.

HOBBES (1588 — 1679) continued the development by
reducing Bacon's teaching to something like a system.
He was not disinclined to the thought of an eternal
power that one might call God if it suited, but could
conceive no knowledge of that God except what came
to us by our senses in contact with material things;
accordingly, we could know nothing about the
existence of God, apart from material things. He
believed that anything real must occupy space, and
consequently be mathematical; also, that all changes
imply motion, and must accordingly be mechanical;
these two ideas were the clear and distinct notions of
his contemporary, Descartes. That any other attributes
of bodies, such as colour, warmth, etc., could be real
he would not allow. Therefore, with him as with
Descartes, the physical universe could be explained on
mechanical lines. In the realm of morality, since all
knowledge is due to sensation, all moral distinctions
were traced to self interest. In so far as Hobbes made
material the source of the idea of God, so did he shatter
the theism of Bacon, without, however, furnishing the

i mi:, i

proof of Bacon's principle that knowledge from

sensation.

It was JOIIX LOCKE (1632 17041 (more fully
treated in the fifth chapter as a background to Iiork<lcv
and Hume) who supplied the beginning of that proof.
lie supported the idea of sensation being tin- basis of
knowledge, by his theory that understanding was wholly
dependent on experience, but that experience v..,
two kinds — sensation and reflection; the reflection
taking place in relation to what was in t lie mind as the
result of sense perception (Leibnitz and Berkeley, as we
have seen, criticised this position from the idealistic
standpoint, see pp. 70-2). His doctrine still retained
traces of theology to the extent of a belief in a Creator,
since something could not come from nothing; but the.se
were eventually dissipated by a succession of brilliant
scientist — philosophers who gradually got rid of the
Supreme Mind, though to this day they are confused
with respect to the problem of the human mind.
However, the basic thought of the sensational school
remained in England, and with succeeding generations
of discovery, invention and studv, developed into the
modern science and modern rationalism that may be
typified by such names as Darwin, Huxley and Spencer.
The philosophic characteristic of these thinkers has been
referred to as " realism," which, as opposed to idealism
of the Kantian and Hegelian types, means that external
objects have a real existence; it is a product of the
later nineteenth century science, whose findings were in
conflict with the remains of supernaturalism, which,
from the rationalists' standpoint, had to be fought, and
is really a dualism of matter and force, or, in other
words, it is a materialist doctrine that zcas never fully
worked out. The English branch of it was in opposi-
tion to German idealism, which permeated English
thought through the work of students of Kant and
Hegel, but it received much support from German
materialism. Therefore, since the time of Locke, the
development of materialism represents a long fight
between supernatural religion and idealist philosophy,
on the one side, and natural science on the other, so,

104 THINKING

although it is not our purpose to follow the develop-
ment of science from the standpoint of science,
nevertheless, since scientific achievements have had a
great effect on both religion and philosophy, they
cannot be disregarded.

Before the time of Locke, Copernicus (1473— 1543)
had laid the base of modern astronomy with his
heliocentric theory, which contradicted previous
religious teaching. Vesalius (1514 — 1564) had made a
start in the direction of modern anatomy. Gilbert
(1540 — 1603) had discovered the principles of terrestrial
magnetism. Lippershey's telescope had appeared in
1608. Galeleo (1564 — 1642) had contributed the
principles of falling bodies, etc. Kepler (1571 — 1630)
had added the laws of motion. At about Locke's time
Harvey (1578 — 1657) discovered the circulation of the
blood, which considerably modified previous physiology.
Boyle (1627 — 1691) discovered the atomic laws, which
constituted the basis of modern chemistry, and which,
as applied to natural processes, ruined much of the
teaching of the Church. Newton (1642 — 1721) gave us
the spectroscope, the planetary laws of motion, and the
universal law of gravitation. Hutton (1726 — 1797)
worked out a systematic foundation of geology (1795),
which contradicted previous ideas of the creation and
the age of the earth. Kant in 1757 and Laplace in 1796
formulated the nebular theory, with a similar result.
Priestley (1733 — 1804) had many discoveries in gases to
his credit, and in combination with Scheele discovered
oxygen, which was finally established by Lavoisier
(1743 — 1794). Cuvier (1769 — 1832) founded the science
of comparative anatomy. Karl von Baer (1792 — 1876)
discovered the mammalian ovum — the basis of compara-
tive embryology, which, more than any other science,
established man's relationship to the animal world.
Wohler (1802 — 1882) in 1828 dealt a great blow to
religious belief by producing urea synthetically; this was
thought to be a compound peculiar to animal life, and as
such part of the handiwork of God. But probably the
greatest blow of all was given by Darwin (1809 — 1882),
who in 1859 published his theory of the " Origin of

THINKING 105

Species." Of course one could enumerate exampl
much greater length, l>ut sufficient 1ms been said t"

indicate the trend of thought that undermined belief in
the supernatural.

The same scientific development had its influence
in philosophy, which wo have seen reflected in the
realism of the nineteenth century; but this realistic
thought is itself undergoing a change consequent upon
further scientific development. Most thinking in
connection with the various sciences has long been
freed from the supernatural, nevertheless until quite
recently it stuck at trying" to prove that mind is a mere
product of ponderable matter. Later students are
taking up the attitude that mind can never be material,
that it indeed is not even physical, but that mind and
matter are two different orders of being, running
parallel to each other. The latter idea, which has
received support from the electron theory, arises as a
contradictory reflex from the idea that matter is nothing
but materialised energy; so, they argue, if thought IS
energised matter then it should be measurable in terms
of "work"' done, just as are other forms of energy;
and, since it is not measurable they conclude that it is
not physical. Such a mode of reasoning, however, is a
long way from proof, its weakness lying in the fact that,
if it were true, nothing could be called physical until it
had been measured; for example, the scent of a flower
is admittedly physical, yet it cannot be said to be capable
of measurement. It will be seen, therefore, that while
these people are presumably scientific in their own fields
of enquiry, they appear to be just as ignorant as many
others when dealing with the problem of the mind, the
obvious reason being that they employ the scientific
method in their own special work, while outside that
sphere they remain mere speculative wondcrers. \\ t
shall see more of this in Part II. of our enquiry: for the
present we must return to the sensational school of
Bacon, Hobbes and Locke, and follow it in its
migration to France.

France in the eighteenth century was in a stat<
feudalism, with, first, a superior territorial clergy:

106 THINKING

second, the nobility; and third, the small landholders,
who were striving to become what is now called the
middle class (the serf or common labourer was "no
class " at all). The small landholders were oppressed;
there was economic servitude for the masses, combined
with a corrupt State reeking- with debauchery and
general mental demoralisation. This was the field in
which English materialism took root and registered its
protest against the tyranny and corruption alike in
morals, religion and State; in fact against all existing
forms of authoritative restraint. The lower orders had
lost all patience, for in addition to the corruption just
mentioned, 'he new machinery being introduced from
England was developing in the industrial areas a
proletariat on the one hand and an industrial capitalist
class on the other. In earlier times the Renaissance
had been influential in producing a mental reaction
against traditional thought, and in the period we are
treating a development of that reaction was exemplified
in the writings of men such as Rousseau and Voltaire;
the rising movement also developed a school of
materialist-atheists who, because they were engaged in
producing a great Encyclopaedia, came to be known as
the Encyclopaedists. Among these were several men of
note — Diderot (the editor), D'Alembert, Montesqieu,
Mirabeau and Baron D'Holbach, the last of whom,
under the name of Miraband, wrote a work entitled
" The System of Nature." This work is representative
of French materialism; it attempts an explanation of the
whole of nature, including man and his mind, on strictly
mechanical lines. We may here see why Engels calls
Bacon, Hobbes and Locke the fathers of eighteenth
century materialists.

The argument running through "The System of
Nature " starts from the assumption that everything
that is, is natural, and is perpetually changing, the
changes being due to motion. Therefore, everything
in the universe is some combination or other of
ponderable matter and motion. Mind is a product of so
much brain matter, and takes effect according to the
material constitution of any particular brain plus its

THINKU ir7

subsequent experience. In addition to the motion oi
bodies, such as vehicles, the moving oi a table,
which can be seen and which excites no particular
attention, there is much motion that cannot be

What we call tbc Soul is really motion of the latter kind,
but man not understanding it has presupposed a self-
moving Soid of a supernatural order of being. There

are no innate ideas, because the intellectual faculties
depend upon sen.se perceptions, though thoughl itself
being motion may be the object of thought, just as a
given direction of motion may be changed by a ;
acting in a different direction.

Morality arises from tbc difference in the constitu
tions of different individuals. Since individuals vary
according" to tbeir material or bodily constitution in
addition to tbeir experiences, and since each tri>
that which pleases him according to bis constitution,
there arises a diversity of interests. In the conflict of
interests, those individuals who have a knowledge <i
nature's laws and are therefore reasoning beings, come
to see that the greatest amount of good accrues to the
individual only when the wishes of other individuals are
taken into account; and so arise the laws of morals, the
general love of man for man, justice in politics and
law, etc.

I >f course, such doctrines were opposed to tyrannical
churches, governments and ( iod. They constituted the
rationalisation of the material interests of the middle
class, and accordingly appeared as the consciously
worked out mental stock-in-trade of the revolutionists
of 1789, who, in place of the former morality of Church.
State and feudal nobility, set up the moral standards of
Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, based upon human
reason. The laws underlying reason in the human mind
were supposed to be eternal in the eternal matter and
motion. With these one-sided materialists, matter was
primary, while thought, being a mere product of brain
substance plus experience, was secondary.

This teaching, though it does away with the Supreme
mind of God as the source of morality, neverti
remains very much at sea when trying to extract moral

108 THINKING

notions from the human mind, for after treating mind
as an effect of matter, it elevates it to the control of
matter by the fact that some men by the aid of their
reason first find out the natural laws, which are deemed
to be eternal, and then impose those laws on other men
who, for lack of this knowledge, are deemed unreason-
able. And. of course, " it stands to reason " that if
natural laws are eternal, so will men who understand
those laws be able to arrive at " eternally " correct
systems of morality, politics, laws and truth. It all
amounts to this, that they had elevated their own reason
over that of their opponents, but did not know what to
do with it when they had got it. They had scornfully
cast on one side the transcendental speculations about
the Supreme mind with its eternal moralities of Church
and State, only in the end to develop motions of
"eternal'" love, freedom, equality, justice, etc., as a
result of worshipping the human mind, and to this
extent they remained idealists, though otherwise doing
much good work on the philosophic materialist field.
While Kant hailed the Revolution and freedom, he
nevertheless, as stated in the last chapter, refuted these
rationalist materialists on the philosophical field,
thereby leaving room for faith in the supernatural, and
thus safeguarding the basis of the authority of the
middle class over the working class.

We have now to notice how materialism broke out in
Germany in the nineteenth century; the story is much
the same. With Austria's defeat by Napoleon at
Austerlitz (1805) and Prussia's similar fate at Jena
(1806), the dying embers of the Holy Roman Empire,
whose flame had gone out at Constantinople in 1453,
parted with their last curl of smoke. This resulted in
a number of small German States acknowledging
Napoleon as their protector. After the fall of
Napoleon the princes of those States agreed to unite in
a confederation, and in each State a constitutional
government was to be set up; this was echoing the
results of the French Revolution, for that nearly went
too far on the side of the proletariat, so in Germany the
middle class tried to get a voice in the government,

THINKING

without revolution. Prussia and Austria, how<
were opposed to popular representation. The Pru
Government was oppressive and unjust from the stand

point of the middle class; it believed in its eternal rights
and did not see why it should give its people a
We have seen that it found justification in He
statement, " all that is reasonable is real, ami all that is
real is reasonable," and. accordingly, " what is, is what
ought to Ik- " ; so l legel was in favour w ith tin.- Pm
Government, hut this Government was not in favour

with those people who wanted a voice in BUCh public
affairs as taxation, and who did not believe that the laws

then existing were " what ought to he," consequently,
since the Government persistently dilly-dallied with the
question of popular representation, a revolution became

necessary.

The whole affair, arising from the economic needs of
the times, was, of course, political, hut open opposition
to the Prussian Government was dangerous worl
the prologue to the German revolution of [848 1 which
found its immediate incentive in the French revolution
of 1848), wherein the German middle class conquered
" liberty," took the form of philosophical arguments in
the press, which quite naturally criticised Hegel's
idealism and the prevalent religion. At first the new-
philosophers fell back on French materialism in their
tight against positive religion, which fight was also
indirectly a political one, so it was not surprising that
their philosophy contained the same essential glorifica-
tion of the human mind after having dispensed with the
Almighty one; this may be seen in the work of Ludwig
Feuerbach (1804 — 1872, of Landshut, Erlanden and
Bruckberg), who put human love as the guide in place
of reason. Later ones, including Carl vogt (1817
1895, of Giessen, German biologist), facob Mjoleschotte
(1822— 1893, Dutch physiologist, of Bois-le-Duc, settled
in Italy), and Ludwig Buchner < [824 1899, "'. Darm-
stadt and Tubingen, physician'), were more like the
modern English rationalists of the Herbert Spencer
type, and believed in nothing but matter and fo
Haeckel (1834— 1919, of Potsdam and Jena, biolo

no THINKING

even thought he had discovered the Soul cells.
Though considerably more advanced from the stand-
point of science, yet, from the standpoint of philosophy,
the nineteenth century materialists (excepting those of
the proletarian movement) were crude and mechanical,
like those of the eighteenth century, in that ponderable
matter was their base; so it is not necessary to work
through their arguments, since they follow the same
main lines and may be read in " Force and Matter " —
an English translation (1864) of Biichner's " Kraft und

Stoff "(1855).

At this point we must turn to the beginnings of
proletarian science. The originators of proletarian
social science (so called because it is not accepted by
the university representatives of the capitalist class, but
which, nevertheless, is nothing short of the science of
society) sprang from Hegel's left wing, the " Young
Hegelians." They were materialists, though in a
different sense from those just treated. FEUER-
BACH, KARL MARX (1818— 1883, of Treves,
Cologne, Paris and London) and FRIEDRICH
ENGELS (1820 — 1895, °f Barmen, Paris, London
and Manchester) were of this school ; but Feuerbach
belonged partly to the crude mechanicalists described
by Engels as the " metaphysical materialists," because
when they had finished with mechanical explana-
tions they fell back on "pure" reason, though
in Feuerbach's case it took the form of sentiment.
If we remember that Hegel, though an idealist, was
a dialectician, and that this was his chief contribu-
tion to philosophy, we shall see why Feuerbach, who
broke through Hegel's " system " but retained the
dialectic " method " of explaining all things as evolving
out of other things, became a materialist dialectician.
He believed that the evolution of society had in the past
been along materialist lines, but he never could cut quite
clear from the mechanical mode of thinking, and so, to
escape the consequences, finally fell into the trap of an
eternal human love as the directive force for the future.
In this he was just like the other materialists, who
prated of " pure " reason, that is, he was an idealist

THINK I' in

with regard to the future. Nevertheless, he <li<l
work, ami stands at the beginning of socialist pnilo
sophy; he is the halfway house from Hegel's dialectic
idealism to Marx and Engels' dialectic materialism,
from which arises scientific socialism; Marx and Ei
are accordingly the real pioneers in Bocial

During the nineteenth century the work of H<
gave increased momentum to the study of history,
Marx, one of the students, took the dialectic method
from him, I >nt applied it from the standpoinl of
materialism. Marx sought to show the law of .social

progress worked out in materialist dialectic-, and one
of his great discoveries was that history from early
communism had been a series of struggles between

different classes. From special studies of those

Struggles, plus the economic and social institutions ot
their periods, he arrived at his concept oi " historical
materialism," which is, that the economic mode of
production (which means the way in which people
their living), determines the general form of society,
and the general mental attitude of any given period.

It determines the kind of slavery, the kind of trade.
the conflicting interests of different -roups and then-
consequent political struggles. As a result of these
Struggles, the conquerers express their interests in
various kinds of laws and of governments; meanwhile
justifying themselves by claiming sanction from on
High through different forms of religion and philo-
sophy, while on the other hand those who are in
opposition contend for an opposite view. Consequently,
if the opposition should represent the economic interests
of a rising class, it has necessarily to attack the existing
political, legal, religious and philosophical institutions.
This accounts for all rising movements being irreligious
from the standpoint of those already in power, while
developing a religion that serves their own purp
it also accounts for the final rising movement,
namely, that of the working class being non-religious.
Literature also does but express the thought of its
period, therefore, taken altogether, the political, l<
religious, philosophical and literary aspects ol thinl

ii2 THINKING

ultimately arise from and necessarily correspond to
given modes of producing- wealth; as the mode changes
so does the thinking; and in the end the changes depend
upon the evolution of tools or methods which enable
wealth to be produced with a less expenditure of energy
than formerly — in this lies the essence of progress.
The evolution of Society expresses the evolution
of tools. This doctrine constitutes what is known as
the " Materialistic Conception of History."

But the study of modes of production, apart from the
purely technical side, expresses itself theoretically in the
science of economics, wherein Marx discovered " the
twofold nature of labour." This idea lies at the root of
his theory of value. These generalisations could not
have been discovered before, because a scientific theory
of value necessarily concerns commodity production,
and could not be thoroughly worked out until such
production had reached an advanced stage, for not until
the system of paying wages had separated more sharply
the middle class from the working class, could it be
clearly seen that the worker sells his labour power, that
is, his strength or ability (physical and mental) to
perform labour, but not the labour itself. Once the
latter idea became clear the secret of the source of profit
was out, and then a great many other things became
clear. Marx' contributions to social science are the
materialistic conception of history, and a well worked
out theory of surplus value (profit in general).

After being exiled from the continent, Marx settled in
England, where he had the chance of studying capital
in its original home. In this work he was assisted by
Engels, and between them they formulated the general
proposition just outlined (Engels gives the greater part
of the credit to Marx). They did this in the ordinary
scientific manner, by first collecting historical material,
forming a general opinion regarding it, deducing what
ought to take place if their general opinion were correct,
and finally noting the general agreement between their
arguments and observed facts. By this method they
arrived at their great generalisation which, though
given at the end of the fourth chapter, will bear

THINKING n ;

repeating — "In every historical epoch the prevailing
modi- <>i economic production and exchange, and Un-
social organisation necessarily following from it. form
the basis upon which is built up and from which alone
can be explained the- political and intellectual history ol
that epoch." But, though Marx and Engels supplied the
general theory it remained for JOSEPH DIETZ<
(1828 -1888, a working tanner born at Blankenberg) to
work out the more detailed aspects of the mental reflex .
this he did by showing the identity of mental work with
the rest of nature. Dietzgen's work will he treated in
Part II. of this book, so we leave it for the present, but
before closing our historical survey, it may he advisable
to refer to some curious products of bourgeois (middle
class) idealism in relation to the misery id' the
proletariat (working class).

As the modern working class was evolved by capitalist
development, and the resultant luxury on the one hand
and misery on the other became more marked, there
were not wanting "high souled " people to point out
the " injustice " of such a state of things, and to suggest
"remedies"; they thought it was only necessary to
think of some scheme of betterment and then to appl)
it; these people are usually called Utopians.

From early times there had been Utopias (impractic-
able dreams of a better society) of different kinds, such
as Plato's "Republic," Aristotle's "Politics,' the
levelling tendencies of Christianity in the Roman
Period with SS. Augustine, Basil and Benedict's " rules
of life," including personal poverty, obedience to the
laws of God, chastity, etc., and excluding any material
considerations that would interfere with the contempla-
tion of (iod; the whole pointing to a community ol
hit crests. Even in Feudal times there was a soil "t
community in land, there were landholders hut not land-
owners; each landholder held of somebody higher in the
social scale, and these ultimately of the King> i"'-
Church), who held it in trust for all his subjects.
Through the Middle Ages there were CommunitK
the monastic orders of Dominicans and Franciscans;
the latter attacked not only the wealthy but even the

11

H4 THINKING

Pope on the question of the rights of private ownership
of property. In 1381 John Ball, of Kent, quoting an
earlier writer, asked " When Adam delved and Eve
span, who was then the gentleman? "

But before this time these mediaeval ideas of
communism were being attacked, for Aquinas had begun
in contradistinction to others of his order (Dominican)
to defend private property; his teaching on this point
may be summarised in the sentence : "A distinction of
property is decidedly in accord with a peaceful social
life." With him Nature makes no division of property,
common property was sufficient before the Fall of man,
but the Fall, and the consequent wickedness of man,
introduced the supremacy of might, which makes the
hope of peaceful intercourse to lie in agreement regard-
ing division of property. Therefore, in the interests of
peace (!) private property is justified, notwithstanding
that "by nature all things are in common." Such
teaching admits of either view, and both sides may quote
him in support, but, in certain cases, he reserves the
right of God, expressed through the Church or through
the State, to decide either way. Here we have the
eternal rights of the Church, ultimately from God.

In law, as distinct from religion, the ethics of property
holding took a different turn and expressed themselves
in antagonism to the supremacy of the Church. Feudal
landholding, from the King downward, consisted of a
series of contracts between man and man, and for the
adjustment of grievances there existed the courts baron
and customary, the sokes of privileged townships and
the courts Christian (clerical criminal courts). There
were quarrels between King, Barons and Church, for
power in law, which ended in the King's favour. Here
we have the supreme authority of the King as the
eternal right. After this, came reform movements
ending in constitutional governments based on the
eternal rights of the people as being superior to either
King or Church, so the common good became divine,
but only to the extent of the middle class.

Then came the Industrial Revolution about 1760, with
a new mode of production (the factory system), bringing

THINKIN< us

with it a mosl shocking development of the already
existing proletariat, and in tin- early nineti titury

there began modern Utopian Socialism both in France
and in England, in which the greater c(>ntni<')> ^mnl was
demanded in the name of the eternal principles of
humanity; numerous " schemes " were propounded, and
numerous sections of the working class are still playing
the same game. In France, Saint-Simon thought thai
an aristocracy of ability should be the rul< urier

proposed the organisation of society into small com-
munities each 01 four hundred families living on a
square league of land; Louis Blanc worked for a State
organisation of industry and Government workshops;
I'roudhon tried to introduce into political economy the
eternal principles of " justice " and " liberty " by means
of a fanciful arrangement of the method of exchange.
In England it took the form of Chartism, based upon
the eternal rights of the people. Robert ( >wen tried the
experiment oi industry run on communal line>. but when
he attacked religion his socialism was called atheism.
As opposed to this there arose an enthusiastic band oi
Christian socialists finding their inspiration in the
Sermon on the Mount; they included Maurice, Kin
and Ludlow. There was also the Anarchist school with
ideas based on the eternal and immutable laws ol
nature, they therefore recognised no law of man
man, nor any God; among these maj be mentioned
Stirner, Bakunine, and, later, though in a small way.
Paraf J aval, while Tolstoy was one of a different type,
who denied the law of man but affirmed the law of I rod.
Along with the above, Ruskin may be taken as typifying
those who worship " the beautiful " as one means
towards social regeneration.

I Mi the industrial field the proletariat have orgai
in trade unions which again e\pre>s an abstract eternal
justice in the form oi "a fair day's wage for a fair
day's work"; while on the political field the) have
organised political parties who seek to apply " hlW
tarian " principles in government, or to e
humanitarian reforms in different aspects of social
life.

n6 THINKING

It will be found that at the root of the activities of
all the foregoing-, whether they be Christian or anti-
Christian, Theists or Atheists, there exists a,n idealist
philosophy expressed in the first case as based upon the
eternal truths of God, and in the second case upon
the eternal principles of human love, or reason, from
which arise eternal justice, eternal right, eternal
freedom, equality and fraternity and many other eternal
sentimentalities. They even go so far as claiming to be
advanced in their thinking, while, as we shall see in
Part II., their idealism is all along preventing them from
seeing the limits to practicability.

In closing this Introduction to the History of
Thinking, if we may dignify such a small and
rough work with that title, we may remember the
evolution of brains, the production of religion and
mythology through ignorance of nature; that the Ionian
philosophers turned to nature and found nothing but
change; later ones turned to examine thinking and
threw nature on one side, thus casting out just the
material needed, although as yet it was too early in the
economic development of the world to solve such
a problem. They thought they had discovered the
permanent principle in mind, but their own logic
reduced their systems to scepticism and faith. Faith
lived on for many centuries with philosophy as a kitchen
help until a revival of logic led the said kitchen help
to demand more and more days " off," and finally to
give a couple of centuries' notice of leaving. Philosophy
ultimately freed itself from theology or nearly so, but
by that time a new method of investigating all sorts of
questions had sprung up, the inductive, or scientific
method, that brought in its train a positive science
which likewise freed itself from philosophy. In science,
men are agreed as to the accuracy of the laws discovered
after they have passed the experimental stage, and by
means of those laws can predict results (though it must
be remembered that changing conditions bring new
laws). But, notwithstanding the successes of science
in fields other than mental, philosophy imagined
thought was produced by pure neason, though no two

THINKING ir7

philosophers could evi r agree, and they have rem

in that unscientific State to this day. Meanwhile, Kant

turned his attention to examining reason. From hi>
time materialism and idealism became more decidedly
separated but ultimately got reconciled by I

though towards the end of the nineteenth century the
cry " Back to Kant " had been raised as a iralve

against the rising materialism. Dietzgen, for the first
time in the history of the world, made thinking into a

science, and consequently philosophy, as such, comes to
an end except for some mystic rags with which a few
grown-up children love to play.

The new materialism of the Marxian brand is rapidly
influencing both the political and industrial wing
the working class movement. The capitalist class, in
mortal dread at losing its grip of "eternal" realities,
no longer cries " Back to Kant," if it must recognise a
doctrine of change, then, hurry along to Bergson, th<*
mystic, whose only reality is a changing "time."
The workers will not be held down by religion;
patriotism is no longer a trustworthy tag, its gorgeous
exterior having become somewhat tarnished through the
war; so, if our masters, as represented in their university
teachers, could only get us mystified with Bergson, their
"great man theory," namely, that social progn
due to the thinking of the "great" men. would, they
think, receive another lease of life.

While the practical fight lies between the forcefully-
defended rights of private property on the one hand,
and the forceful abolition of slavery on the other, the
theoretical tight lies between the remains of philosophy,
a false economics and a so-called impartial history on
the capitalists' side, as against a scientific method of
thinking, a science of economics rind a history alive with
class struggles on the workers' side. We now leave the
history OI thinking and pass to a short exposition of
its science.

PART II

LOGIC, OR THE SCIENCE OF
UNDERSTANDING

PART I!
Logic, or the Science of Understanding

CHAPTER IX

Logic applied to the General Nature of Thought (Mind)
and of Things (Matter)

From the time when the (Greeks turned away from
nature and took to examining mind, down to the
present, there have been two main streams of
philosophic thought which in their passage have not
always been clear and distinct from each other, nor
has even their general nature been interpreted in the
same way at all times ; these lines of thought are idealism
and materialism. After Descartes they became more
clearly distinguished, and still more so after Kant.

Both materialists and idealists take existence as a
fact; the materialist (old school) says the nature of this
existence is ponderable matter (the later ones, such as
Sir Oliver Lod.^e. have etherialised it hut still regard it
as physical), though he does not deny the phenomena
of mind; he conceives of it as some sort of emanation
from matter, but which has no existence in its own
right. On the other hand, the idealist says the nature
of existence is mental, though he does not deny the
phenomena of matter, but conceives of it as an illusion
of mind. It will be seen that each admits the phenomena
of the other and tries to interpret it in terms of his own
particular fancy; each can prove to his own satisfaction
that the other is wrong, though each fails to prove t<>
his opponent's satisfaction that he himself is right

122 THINKING

Now it must be remembered that the terms " mind"
and "matter" are merely names which enable us to
distinguish between two different things, but, since the
names are not the things, it does not follow that
because we use two names there are two completely
separate and distinct things, so different that they have
nothing in common, the two may be just two parts of
one thing and only mentally separated. As we go on we
shall see that all the philosophic word-spinning arises
from the use of a rigid logic which first makes mental
distinctions, gives names to the parts, and then treats
the parts as being distinct and separate, whereas in
reality they are not so ; it was in this way that the old
philosophers first started with unity (the universe) and
then instinctively separated it into mind and matter
without being fully conscious of what they had done,
since when their philosophic descendants have been
staring at mind. in one hand and matter in the other,
wondering which part constitutes both parts.

Before passing on to study the newer logic, which
treats of thinking in relation to a constantly-changing
universe, it may be as well to give some of the general
laws of this rigid logic for purposes of comparison.
First, there is the law of identity, by which we say
A is A; second, the law of contradiction which says that
A is not B; and third, the law of the excluded third
which says that A is not part of B. According to the
first of these rules, a thing is what it is; according to
the second, no thing is what it is not; and, according to
the third, no thing is part of what it Is not. As
examples : —

A square is a square, a square is not a circle, nor is a
square part of a circle.

A straight line is straight, it is not crooked, nor is it
partly crooked.

A moving thing is in motion, it is not still, nor is it
partly still.

Land is land, land is not water, nor is it partly water.

A door that is shut is shut, it is not open, nor is it
partly open.

In our everyday business we all employ this sort of

THINKING

logic, nor could we manage very well without it,
neverthele it needs supplementing by the dialectic
method which shows that all things arc constantly

flowing into other things, and consequently that all I
statements, such as the foregoing, can he tine only

within certain well-defined limits, anil are never wholly

true; and which shows, furthermore, that unless the
limits of a question are clearly defined, no statement
regarding it can have a>>\< meaning, because no relation
si lip hetween the implied fact and the statement has been
established : tin-, in working class language, moan- " lei
us know what we are talking about, otherwise talking i-
no good." As an example, take the statemenl " a door
that is open is not shut "; while this looks like common-
sense, in reality it is not sense at all unless we
the purpose in view, for, assuming a door to be open one
inch, it would he open for the purpose of letting in noise
or a draught, hut it would not he open for allowing a
person to pass, so accordingly the truth of the statement
will vary as the purpose to be realised varies. As
another example, suppose it be said that " right i-
right, right cannot be wrong," this statement has no
meaning at all unless we connect ft with some definite
purpose, when we very quickly discover that any
particular statement might be right in relation to some
purpose but wrong in relation to others.

Logic, it need hardly be said, is to enable us to make
distinctions between different things so that we may
find our way about in the mental world without making
mistake^. But to be any good, the work of distinguish-
ing must obviously start from some point about which
nobody can quarrel, something that is certain; and the
rock-bottom fact from which nobody can get away is
plainly that of existence, for it is clearly impossible to
argue about that which does not exist, and since
" existence " includes everything, existence, here,
means the same thing that we call Universe, or
Being or Nature. People who think of a Creator
outside the universe are attempting to imagine
a universe that is not a universe. So the urn
exists, and is the only thing that exists. t/onse-

124 THINKING

quently, the thing we call mind must be a part
of it, and the thing we call matter must be another
part of it, they differ, of course, otherwise we should not
require a different name for each; and since mind or
understanding is busily engaged in understanding both
itself and as much of the remainder as it can get at,
there is evidently a relation between the understanding
which knows and the object that is known, even when
the understanding is concerned with itself. Our present
work is to study this relationship, to trace out its
connections and limitations, and our starting point is
the whole universe, the only single thing, the only
absolutely true unit.

A unit is, of course, capable of being divided into an
infinite number of parts after the manner represented
in Fig. 2, which shows that while one-sixteenth is not
another sixteenth yet they are both parts of one-eighth,
two-eights are parts of one-quarter, and similarly with
all the rest.

Fig. 2. The Universe.
1

i i

4~ 4

11 11 11 11 11 1111 11
TS Tff T6 1^ Ttf TS 15 16 TS TS T~5 Tt T* T* TT T6

For certain purposes, any of these fractional parts
may be taken as a unit; for example, an eighth, when
considered as a unit, may be split into two halves (not
sixteenths), but we must never forget that this is merely
a mental convenience because the only real unit is the
universe. Therefore, we may start anywhere, call our
particular point a unit and break it down into its parts,
or we may take a given number of parts and with them
construct a unit. The contradiction that exists when we
say that one half is not the other half (A is not B) is
reconciled as soon as we consider them joined together

THINK IXC

in one unit ; the idea of contradiction is. therefore, a
product of our understanding which is constantly either
splitting up units or constructing them in classifying the

different parts of the universe.

\'o\v tin's is very easy to see when put in the form ol

figures, and although the essential character of under-
standing is number, yet, when we come to apply it to
the universe or to any part of it, the idea is so strange

that most folks never realise that it is what human
brains are doing all along, and through the lack of a
knowledge of this general principle of thinking they
necessarily perform their thinking instinctively instead
of scientifically, and consequently make far more
mistakes than they would if they knew the scientific
principle and consciously applied it.

To understand the universe the understanding divides
it into a great number of parts, that is. it classifies or
separates the parts and gives them names to distinguish
one from the other, though in reality these parts do in it
exi>t separately; for example, the universe, though it is
in itself one whole, may be divided mentally into solar
systems, a solar system may be divided into a central
sun and several planets of which the earth is one, and
the earth may be divided into land and water, and so on
to infinity. For ordinary purposes it would be false to
say that land and water are the same thing, it would
be a contradiction; nevertheless, this contradiction,
which is a product of the understanding, disappears if
we say that land and water are both parts of the earth,
for if one is a part of the earth and the other equally so,
then, considered as farts of the earth, each is the same
as the other. From this it follows that a thing can he
the same as another thing and at the same time be
different from it, and all this depends upon the way we
look at any given problem, in other word-, depends upon
the purpose we nave in view; whereas old-style logic
would say " land is land, land is not water, nor does \\
partake of the nature of water in any way," and, there
fore, that " land is not water " is a true statement — true
for all time; though in the next argument it might seek
to prove that England is the best of all lands, forgetting

126 THINKING

that England contains many lakes, rivers, reservoirs,
etc.

Very well, let us with the help of the newer logic
turn to the question of mind and matter! The
idealist insists on mind as the dominant reality, the old
materialist looks at the question the other way about
and pins his faith to ponderable matter. Contrary to
each of these schools, we start from the existence of a
real universe which our understanding may divide in
hundreds of ways according to its particular problem at
any given moment, and since our problem just now is
that of the understanding itself, then for the purposes
of this discussion we divide the universe into mind and
matter, or, to be more correct, thought and things.

But what shall we call the universe itself? Is it a
material or physical or real universe? Well, it is
certainly a real universe, for we cannot deny that even
thought is real thought; thought is not nothing at all,
consequently thought, being part of the universe, it
must possess the same universal nature as is possessed
by everything else, whatever that should be. " But,"
the reader may say, " thought is so different from a
lump of coal, surely it is not suggested that they have
the same nature"? "And," one might ask in return,
" are not wireless radiations different from coal and yet
both are described as physical"? "True enough, but
still, thought is different even from ' wireless,' thought
has an intellectual character that no other thing has."
"Just so; but if every other thing had the same
character there would be no object in making the
distinction; it is precisely because thought has a special
character of its own, we give it a special name." We
give wireless radiations their special name to distinguish
them from coal and all other things. A brain is different
from wireless instruments or our legs, so why should
we be surprised because all these things exhibit different
functions ? It is not marvellous that brains should think,
but it would be exceedingly so if they did not. We do
not walk on our brains and think with our legs. The
peculiar function of brains is to think, of legs to walk,
and of wireless instruments to transmit and receive

THINKING 127

electrical radiations, .so why should we expect anything
different, <>r why should we single out thought (called
mind) as having a nature so special and peculiar a-^ to

separate it entirely from all the rest of the universe?
Thinking is the function of a physical brain, just like
walking is a function of physical legs, and even though
the conversion of sense stimuli into thought is not
understood, this does not prove that thought is not
physical, if it did, then, by comparison, we should have
to say that electricity is not physical because we do not
understand the nature of the conversion of magnetism
into electricity. Even so, does it follow that if
" wireless " and thought are physical that they are also
material? Well, that depends upon how the reader
mentally divides the universe. If he divides it into
the ponderable, such as coal, iron, pencils, etc., and the
imponderable, such as thought, light, sound, electricity,
ether or gravity, and then decides to describe the
ponderable as material and the imponderable as
immaterial, that is his own affair, but please let him
remember he did it himself, it is not so in nature merely
because he arranged his classification that way, and to
describe thought as psychical does not alter its nature.
Had we all along been" in the habit of calling all things
material the present question would not have arisen.
So. if we call thought material it is in order to bring its
description (its nature is already in line) into line with
that of the rest of what most people, ourselves included,
call the material universe; and the term " material "is
as good as any we can find, for old-style logic made its
distinction between mind and matter but left us without
a term that would include both; therefore, in discussing
the relation that exists between the different pan-- .'I
the universe we must bear in mind that thought is a
material part just like any other.

I laving seen that the universe can be mentally divided
into an infinite number of parts, as suggested in Fig. 3.
all of which have their special natures and special names
to distinguish them from one another, in addition to
their general material nature and corresponding name,
our progress will consist in noting how these different

128 THINKING

parts are related to each other. All parts enter into
relations with other parts, though each part, excepting
thought, has a limited range of relationships which

Fig. 3. Parts of Material Universe.

depends upon its particular constitution; thought alone
is capable of entering into relation with every other part.
Take, for example, vinegar and iron. If we pour
vinegar on iron it dissolves the iron and forms rust,
but this rust is due as much to the iron as to the vinegar,
therefore, to say that vinegar is a solvent is wrong if
considered by itself, because vinegar is not a solvent
unless taken in relation to something that dissolves by
contact with it. Or, to say that vinegar is an acid is
wrong, it is an acid when in contact with somebody's
tongue but not in those relationships where acidity is
not produced. If we say that water is liquid, we mean it
is liquid in relation to certain temperatures; at other
temperatures it becomes ice or steam, its liquid state

THINKING 129

is) therefore, the producl of itself taken in conjun
with some other part or parts of the universe, such as
heat or gravity. From these examples we see that no
one thing is anything at all by itself, any one part of

the universe is what it is only because of its relation
with something else, therefore every so-called " single"
thing is a product of many things, it is a mental unit
made up of fractions ; for example, a piece of iron cannot
mceived without its shape, weight, colour, heat,
etc., once change the relationships and the thing
changes, and when it has changed so much that its
previous general nature is changed it requires a different
name. As an instance, imagine the general character of
dust along a road; after very light rain we should say
the dust was laid; the nature of the dust would be
changed, though, not so much as to make it require
another name, for we should still call it dust, but after
heavy rain its nature would be changed to such an extent
that it would have acquired a different general character
and we should have to describe it as mud. Giving names,
however, presupposes that we have thought about
something, in fact, we cannot imagine anything existing
that has not been thought about, for in the very act
of attempting to do so we are already thinking about
it, so this brings US to consider the relation between
thought and everything with which it comes into contact.

Thought— Its General Character. A thought like
any other part of existence, is made up of matiy
parts. It arises from the relation between a thinking
brain (and a brain that does not think loses its
character and ceases to be what we mean when we
speak of a brain) and some object about which the brain
thinks. This thought, just like the rust, is as much a
product of the object as of the thinking, for it is clear
there never was a brain that could think about nothing.
And again, it will be clear that there must be some
medium by which the relation between brain and object
is established. This medium is composed of OUT five
senses (and possibly a sixth in the course of being
evolved) — seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling and tasting.

1

130 THINKING

These senses acquaint us with the various parts of
objects, for any single object, as already stated, is made
up of many parts, such as shape, weight, colour, heat,
etc. Take, for illustration, an apple; our sense of sight
perceives its roundness and colour, when we chew it
our sense of hearing perceives a sound, it gives off a
characteristic odour perceived by our sense of smell, by
our sense of touch or feeling we perceive that it has
weight, shape, solidity, coolness, etc., and our sense of
taste acquaints us with its specific flavour. Not one of
these sense perceptions is sufficient by itself, nor, indeed,
would they all, taken together, give us a mind picture
of the apple, without a brain which, so to speak, adds
them together. The peculiar function of the brain is
to combine or to generalise all these sense perceptions
into one idea to which it gives the name " apple " for
the purpose of distinguishing that particular combination
of parts from other and different combinations.
If we had another sense capable of being applied
we should get our idea extended accordingly, just as in
the reverse case our idea would be narrowed, as, for
example, in the case of a blind person who has no sense
of colour; from this it will be seen that a brain cannot
replace any of the senses, brain and senses having each
their special functions to perform. It is important also
to remember that although thinking and thought occur
at the same time, they are not the same things. Thought
is a result, thinking is the work of producing that result,
thinking, however, is impossible without some object to
think about, so the whole thing is a sort of trinity that
might be represented by a triangle as in Fig. 4.

Since it is the peculiar function of the brain to
generalise sense perceptions into ideas, and since our
ideas constitute knowledge, it will be clear that under-
standing consists solely of our ability to combine
different parts of the universe under one head or name,
whereby we may know it from something else; or,
speaking in terms of number, our ability to combine
four-sixteenths into one-quarter, two-eighths into a
quarter, and so on; or, again, to use a more practical
illustration, we may take apples, oranges and bananas,

THINK IXC.

i [1

etc., and give them the general pame <>f fruit; .-* < 1 < 1 to
these, vegetable . bread, meat, drink our

extended generalisation becomes food; add, a

Cork. I •

existence

Fig. 4. Brain Work.

clothes, fuel, furniture, books, houses, we might call
these, altogether, the necessaries of life. No matter
how large or how small, every single idea is made up
of parts; even the idea of an atom contains parts such
as shape, weight, chemical peculiarity, size, etc.

It is possible to mentally generalise or combine any
number of parts up to the limit of the whole umV
whether they arc actually combined in that way or not
outside the head, as, for example, when an artist
conceives a fanciful picture, or a novelist writes an
extravagant novel, or when, as in a nightmare, the I >e\ il

with cloven hoofs and a red hot pitchfork carried us off

to Hell, or when we imagine a Government that acts

impartially to everybody, or when somebody tells the

132 THINKING

workers that "a better spirit" between masters and
men will solve economic troubles to all peoples' satis-
faction. It must be borne in mind that these fancies are
all truly parts of the universe, that is, they are real
fancies, even mistakes and lies are real mistakes and
true lies; we mean by this that they have a real existence,
for thought, as we have said, is real; it would be a funny
contradiction to speak of " imaginary " thought. What,
then, is the difference between truth and error ? This
question brings us to consider the other part of brain
activity.

We have hitherto considered the brain as a generalising
instrument, wherein it combines sense perceptions into
an abstract idea or unit. But it also works the other way ;
it analyses an idea by breaking it down into its parts.
We have seen that every single idea is composed of
parts which by division run to infinity, and which by
addition run into one another up to the limit of the
universe; this for us is also infinity. We have further
seen that no idea is possible without both a brain and
some object, connected by the senses. Now where the
idea or abstract picture in the mind corresponds with
some object outside the mind (any part of existence
whatsoever, including thought, may be the object of
thought), it will be clear that such a picture will be a
true picture, but if the opposite is the case it will be
false. By way of illustration, suppose a novelist wrote
a tale describing a foreign tribe of human beings who
lived by eating coal ; this tale would be a true tale in so
far as it itself exists as a tale, but it would be false in
so far as coal outside the mind is not a food, and, there-
fore, to generalise coal under the name of food would
be an error because it would lack that correspondence
between abstract mind picture and outside objective
existence which is necessary for truth; it would be like
trying to make three-sixteenths into one-eight. Truth,
then, evidently consists of those mental or subjective
generalisations which correspond with objective reality,
and just as objective reality changes, so does truth
change; for example, we have just said that coal is not
a food, but suppose that in the future some chemist

THINKING 133

discovered a way of cooking coal so that it could be

eaten, and the energy which is now latent in it he

assimilated by the human body, such changed conditions
would bring it about that what is now error would then
be true, and onr unit (food) would be enlarged to
accommodate the new factor. Therefore, since all ideas
are built up as mind pictures from sense perception-, ot
material objects, tangible and intangible, to test an idea
for truth, we must break it down into its parts, then
look outside the mind to see if the previous mental
combination is possible as an outside objective com-
bination; if it is, the idea is true; if not, it is untrue. By
now it should almost go without saying that such
generalisations as sea serpents, mermaids, twodieaded
donkeys, angels, and happy hunting grounds, in fact,
all the ghosts of heaven and earth, holy and unholy, are
those whose parts are abstract mind pictures taken from
concrete parts of nature outside the mind and added
together inside the mind; although the parts exist
outside the mind, the combination docs not, conse-
quently they are errors, for the reason that too many
factors have been combined to agree with objective
reality.

Still, the matter is not ended, for even though we
confine our attention to real objective combinations,
another difficulty arises, because if all things run into
one another how shall we know when a mind picture
corresponds with reality, where shall we look, where
shall we start with our generalising, or where shall we
stop? There is only one thing possible, and that i- to
seleet or mentally mark off that fart of the universe the
truth of which is to he sought (" let us know what we
are talking about "), and then abstract its general
character. Our selected number of parts we may
imagine to thin out at each end where the general
character is merging or flowing into other things with
different names; these thin ends are the special parts,
as compared with the general body, and if we -peak of
them as being typical of the general body, we should he
wrong, we should be taking too few factors to agree
with the general objective reality; consequently these

134 THINKING

special parts must be ignored, they do not constitute the
truth concerning that particular number of parts
because they do not express its general character, so
truth is, accordingly, that which is general within a
clearly denned part of existence; this is true logic,
because it provides for a continual readjustment of our
abstract mind pictures, to correspond with a continually
changing objective reality. As a simple example it
would be true to describe apples and bananas as fruit,
but false to describe them simply as food without any
qualification, notwithstanding that fruit is a food; this
would be false for the simple reason that the term
" food " denotes something having a general nature
possessed by many other things as well as fruit, so to
say that fruit constitutes food would be making the
special element into the general. Again, food is not the
necessaries of life, it is only one of them; the
" necessaries of life " constitutes a wider unit or
generalisation, because its common or general nature is
possessed by other things as well as food. Truth, then,
is any statement that accurately expresses the general or
common features of a certain definite number of parts
and, of course, is relative to those parts, vary the
number of parts and the common nature will vary, and
truth likewise.

Though this logic is easy in theory, it is not always
easy in practice, so from this point onwards we will
,-tpply it to a series of questions by way of illustration,
remembering that no idea is possible without sense
perception, and therefore every idea may be understood
by tracing it to its sense perceived source.

Mind. The brain, of course, is not the mind,
it is the seat of the mind ; but since the word
" mind " certainly stands for an idea of something,
there arises the question, what is this " something,"
"or what is the mind itself? Let us apply our
logic. Since every single idea is built up of parts,
nnd is expressed by a name, if we analyse the
idea represented by its name we shall get at the nature
of the thing for which the name stands, therefore, to

THINKING 135

understand the mind, we must examine its parts. When
we speak of mental work we think of a vast number of
ideas, memories, reflections, judgments, acts of the will.
etc.. in short, our general reasoning. And we think of
the mind as a being of some shadowy kind that performs
all the reasoning. However, if we break down the idea
of mind into its parts, we find that memories are ideas,
reflections are ideas, judgments are ideas, in fact, all
our reasoning is composed of ideas, the mind, then,
consists of a bundle of ideas which are, as we know,
produced by sense perceptions (the stimulus of which
may last quite a time, as in the case of memory) being
generalised by our brains, so there can be no " reason "
or " mind " that produces or originates ideas without
something to think about, without sense perception-.
Looked at like this it becomes clear that what we call
" mind " is not a shadowy something that we can never
get at and which thinks thoughts entirely unaided, but
on the contrary it is the sum total of all the ideas we
possess, and apart from these ideas there is nothing at
all, for even the idea of " mind " must have a basis of
sense perceptions; it is simply that the brain combines
all its ideas into one generalisation, that is, into one unit
to which it nives the name of " mind "; so mind, then,
is nothing but generalised thought. No wonder
scientists cannot find it with the knife and the micro-
scope; theologians, of course, are interested in not
looking for it.

Still, there is one point that needs explaining ; if ideas
are impossible without sense perceptions, how does the
brain get the idea of mind, seeing that the mind is
composed of ideas inside the head? Which of our
senses enables us to become aware of them? It is the
sense of feeling, for when we are thinking, we feci that
zve arc thinking, a fact which everyone may test; for
example, we feel sorry, or glad, or we feel we could hit
certain people at times. In this case the sense of feeling
presents a. series of perceptions of thoughts to the
brain, and the brain in its functioning generalises them
into the one idea of " mind." Our logic thus solves the
twenty-six-centuries-old problem of " mind " and " pure

136 THINKING

reason " ; let us next see what it can do with the
corresponding problem of matter or things.

Matter — Its General Nature. What is matter? Let
us apply our logic in just the same way as when
examining mind. If every idea is built up of
parts, we ask what are the parts constituting the
idea of matter? Take for example a table. Kant
would tell us that all we know about the table is
composed of its appearances, but that in addition
there must be something behind the appearances.
though we never can know it, a "thing in itself."
Various philosopher-scientists say the same thing in
various ways; for instance, that light is not the beautiful
colour we see, but an ethereal wave motion of which
we become aware by noting its effects; or, that the
colour of an object, or its weight, shape, etc., are only
attributes of the object and not the thing in reality.
They tell us that not a particle of matter is ever
destroyed, that its form is constantly changing, but,
through all the changes of form the essential matter
remains. Now, what is this essential matter when
divested of its attributes ? Some say we shall never
know, for nothing ever appears to our senses but the
attributes, and these do not constitute the essence, for
the essence or true nature of matter is something that
lies beyond.

It is indeed perfectly true that our senses do not
acquaint us with its true nature, but our understanding
(brain function) does, and when scientists say we shall
never know, it can only be because they do not under-
stand how all understanding takes place. The true or
essential nature of matter does not, as we have said,
appear to the senses but to our understanding, though
the parts of the idea come to us through the senses just
like the parts of all ideas. Imagine for a moment what
would become of the table if we took away one after the
other all its attributes. When we have taken away its
colour, solidity, weight, shape, hardness, grain, etc.,
there is nothing left, nothing at all; it therefore could
not appear to our senses, and yet we have the idea of it;

THINKING 137

now how can we have the idea of a thing that does not
exist ?

The brain firsl thinks of all kinds of objects — water,
horses, coal, etc., etc.; these objects have each the
common attribute of being material, even though they
cacli possess many different and special attributes (also
matt-rial); the brain, then, separates the special
characteristics from the general] and with these many
parts of material generality, constructs the idea of
" essential matter " as distinct from its attributes. So,
only in the light of our logic does it become clear to us
that matter, apart from its attributes, is nothing but an
abstracl generalisation. Therefore, in reality, matter
consists of the sum total of its attributes, its general
nature is unceasing change, and there is nothing else
beyond. We see, then, that this " essential matter" is a
creature of the mind; this concept may perhaps be ren-
dered more easily intelligible if we think for a moment
of the impossibility of there being any stable unchanging
matter apart from its changing forms, without any
attributes, without any form. The raw material of
material attributes is as funny as imaginary thought!

It will now be clear that mind is not a " thing in
itself" independent of thoughts, and which thinks
thoughts or produces them out of its inmost recesses;
in reality, it is the brain which generalises sense
perceptions into ideas, and these ideas, taken altogether,
constitute the mind. It will also be clear that matter i>
not a " thing in itself" independent of its forms, and
which takes first one form, then another; it is the brain
which generalises selected sense perceptions of material
attributes into the idea of matter, so that in reality all
attributes taken together constitute matter. So mind
consists of the sum total of thoughts, and matter
consists of the sum total of its forms; consequently
mind and matter considered as separate entities (things
existing by themselves) are nothing but mental
generalisations, produced instinctively, but. because the
understanding did not understand itself, it did not know
how it got them and thought they represented definite
parts of objective reality.

CHAPTER X

Logic applied to Physical Science

In the last chapter we were occupied in explaining the
principles of that logic which treats the universe as a
thing in motion, in opposition to ordinary logic which
makes its distinctions and considers them as stationary.
In our treatment we dealt with the general nature of
thought and of things, and we saw that both thought
and things were material or physical, so that science in
any line of enquiry must of necessity be physical science ;
nevertheless, as all divisions of the universe are made
by the understanding in its desire for classification, we
now, for the purposes of this chapter, take the liberty
of dividing all science into the mental and the physical;
we therefore use the word " physical " in the sense
usually attached to it as meaning all that is not mental
or metaphysical; consequently we shall be concerned
with such things as force, light, sound, matter, cause,
effect, and so on. Since the basis of the solution of
every problem, so far as logic is concerned, lies in under-
standing the origin of all the ideas contained in it, our
progress will consist in applying to such things the
principles we have already learned. It is futile to say
that it does not matter where we get the ideas so long
as we have them, for the reason that so long as we
cannot trace them to their source we cannot make any
scientific selection, nor can we understand how under-
standing itself takes place.

Nature. Take first the idea of nature, since it is the
basis of all science. What is Nature?

Remembering that every single idea is produced by

138

THINKING 139

the brain generalising a number of sense perceptions,

and thus reducing them to unity, we must attack the idea
of Nature by breaking it into its parts to see where we
gel it.

Nature consi>ts of the sum total of all the things we
experience with the aid of our senses; all these things
have their special natures according to their constitu-
tion, but the understanding puts these specialities on
one side, it mentally takes the general natures of all
things apart from their special characters, and combines
them into one abstract whole, to which it gives the name
of Nature, which afterwards is supposed to be the parent
of the specialities. Therefore it is not our senses that
perceive " Nature," they only perceive the various parts
separately, but with those parts the understanding
constructs the idea of nature in general; it is accordingly
the understanding which perceives nature as a whole.
As a rule, when we speak of Nature producing beautiful
flowers, healing wounds, causing this and that, or when,
as is quite usual, we speak of " the wonders of Nature "
after the manner of poets and dreamers, including not a
few scientists, who are continually marvelling about our
great " mother nature," we have a vague, indistinct
notion of Nature being something unknowable, a kind
of universal directive agency which somehow, in a
transcendental manner, causes all the things we
experience; but with our logic we see that there is no
" mother nature " apart from all the things that go to
construct her; so this idea is just an instance of the
understanding constructing one thing out of many
parts, or, as it is often put, constructing unity out of
multiplicity.

According to this all things are natural, and cannot be
anything else: so what do we mean when we say a thing
is unnatural, has the term no meaning? Oh yes. We
do not mean the thing has no nature at all. It means
the unusual, or special, that which is not general, or
that to which we are not accustomed, and which, there-
fore, is not included in our general conception of what
we expect. So the natural and the unnatural are simply
two mental divisions of those things we have

140 THINKING

experienced, the one general, the other special. For
example, it is not usual for people in England to murder
their parents when they are getting old, and if somebody
did we should probably say it was a most unnatural
thing to do; it is, of course, unusual or special. But if
it were generally practised, as it was among low savage
hunting tribes, it would be regarded as quite all right
and the most natural thing to do. To give another
example : when exceptionally dark clouds come over-
head during the daytime, that give the appearance of
night, it is said to be unnatural. We therefore see the
unnatural to be merely the general character of the
unusual or special, whereas the natural is the general
character of that which is usual, and therefore more
widely general.

Old style logic would say, the natural is natural, it is
not unnatural, nor is it partly unnatural. Dialectic
logic says that the unnatural is both unnatural and
natural at one and the same time, for the reason that all
things are natural, though we only give the name
natural to that which is general in relation to any
particular part of nature which happens to be under
discussion, while the unnatural is any special circum-
stances relating to that same part. If Nature in its
entirety is being discussed, then there can be nothing
unnatural, for nature in that sense includes everything.
We turn now to consider some special parts of nature.

Cause and Effect. There is a fourth rule of logic
known as "the law of adequate cause," which means
that every effect must have a sufficient cause; and
it is quite commonly accepted by " educated " people
who are ignorant of logic (true logic) that not only
must an effect have a cause, but that this cause
must be the effect of a previous cause which
is the effect of a still more previous cause, and so
on back to the " first cause," which itself never
was caused. Some say the first cause is God, others
Nature, though all believe its essential character to be
unknown; and no wonder, when we consider for
a moment that if an effect had never taken place the

THINKING 141

cause could never have been a cause, therefore the
effect is as much the cause of the cause being a cause,
as the cause is the cause of the effect— if the child had
never been horn the father would never have been its
father, so the child is as much the cause of the father
being the father, as the father is the cause of the child.
Hut what really constitutes a cause? Let us apply our
logic and break the ideas of cause and effect into their
parts, thus seeing where we get them.

With the understanding that all parts of the universe
are continually changing, it is obvious that some of the
parts precede others in the order of time. The senses
supply the brain with ^ense perceptions of those parts
that generally precede, and the understanding adds
them together to form the idea of cause. For example,
in summer, showers of rain generally precede or bring
about a cooler atmosphere; the senses of sight and of
feeling supplv the brain with perceptions of falling rain
preceding a feeling of coolness at such times, where-
upon the brain function combines all those separate
perceptions into the one idea of rain being the cause of
the coolness. In the same way the idea of effect may
be broken into its parts; they consist of sense
perceptions of phenomena that generally follow. For
example, the sense of feeling supplies the brain with
perceptions of coolness that generally follow the falling
of rain at such times, and the brain function combines
these perceptions into the one idea of coolness being the
effect of the rain.

But looking a little more closely, we see that rain
could not cause coolness were there no heat for it to
absorb, so the heat is as much a cause of coolness as the
lain. And again, if the coolness had not taken place
after the rain (and there are times when it does not, as
far as our senses tell us) the rain could not have been a
cause, therefore, at the time when it did take place the
coolness is as much a cause of the rain causing coolness
as the rain itself. From this we see there is no such
thing as a cause " in itself." It is the understanding
that constructs the ideas of cause and effect. And,
moreover, with every extension of parts so does the

142 THINKING

cause vary; for example, if rain is the cause of coolness,
so is the heat of the atmosphere, and the contour of the
land that produces rain, also the wind that carries the
moisture, and the sun that raised it. Here we see that
all these small generalisations constitute the special or
particular parts out of which the understanding
constructs the greater generalisation of a " first
cause"; and then, because man cannot understand a
cause not consciously directed, and this is because
his knowledge of the universe takes the form of
intelligence, he says there must be a God who causes it
all ; but, when we remember that all ideas, including that
of cause, are abstract mental generalisations of sense
perceptions, it becomes a waste of time to think about a
first cause that is independent of a material basis, for it
is obvious there cannot be any such thing. The idea is
a wrong generalisation of parts that have no
corresponding generalisation in reality. Nature as the
great uncaused cause, consists of the sum total of all
the smaller or special causes, so there is no one cause
except as a mental abstraction.

Absolute Straightness. It is well known that the
most perfect line, drawn by the most able of draughts-
men, with the aid of the best instruments and
on the best paper for the purpose, will, if seen through
a miscroscope, show many irregularities. We may,
therefore, conclude there is no absolute straight-
ness in nature, and yet the idea of it plays a very
important part in geometry, mechanics, architecture,
etc. Now, if every idea is based on sense perceptions,
and if there is no absolute straightness in nature for the
senses to perceive, how do we come by the idea? To
solve this question we must follow our logic and break
the idea into its parts. In nature there are many lines
that appear to be straight, some more so than others,
so the brain takes the many sense perceptions of objects,
separates the qualities of straightness from all other
qualities of the objects, and out of the many parts or
degrees of straightness constructs the unity or one
single idea of absolute straightness. It is therefore

THINKING 143

perfectly true that the senses do not perceive tin-
absolutely or theoretically straight, they only perceive
the special or separate parts of it ; it is the understanding
alone that perceives the general nature of straightness,
hut, of course, it could not do this without the material
supplied by the senses. So, complete and absolute
straightness is not something- that exists first and from
which all the less perfect parts are derived; on the
contrary, it consists of all the parts of straightness,
separated from other qualities and taken mentally as one
whole; apart from these it has no existence. To say
that a thing is straight is like saying a thing is right,
neither statement has any meaning unless we connect it
with some purpose, for example, we might say that a
certain piece of wood is straight for the purpose of
making a window-frame but not for testing a lathe
bed.

The Exact Mathematical Unit. No two potatoes,
men, scientific instruments or finely-wrought billiard
balls are exactly alike, so where do we get the
idea of exact equality between one and one, or
between one hundred and one hundred, if all ideas are
based on sense perceptions? If we break the idea of
an abstract unit into its parts we find that the senses
perceive varying degrees of what appears to be quantita-
tive similarly in various objects. The understanding
mentally separates these particular perceptions from
those of weight, colour, etc., and by selecting the
general element of equality from the varying degrees
of approximate equality, constructs the idea of
absolutely similar units of quantity. An absolutely
exact unit is, therefore, not perceived by the senses
(they perceive only the parts of the idea) but is produced
by the understanding working with sense-perceived
material, from which it mentally separates the general
element of quantitative equality from all other parts of
the universe. This absolute unit, then serves as the
base for abstract calculations of all kinds, and is the
abstract foundation of mathematical consistency or
truth, though one should not forget that the whole range

144 THINKING

of mathematical reasoning" has no meaning unless
applied to something practical, when it is very quickly
discovered that allowances have to be made; therefore,
no such independent mathematical truth exists, as has
been affirmed, except as a mental generalisation based
on sense-perceived material. Those who speak of the
eternal principles of the circle, the triangle, etc., and
who think these principles exist in things independently
of men's thoughts, are evidently unaware that every
" single" thing is a product of many things, including
thought; therefore, all principles are abstract generalisa-
tions of sense perceptions. It is no doubt a principle (to
the mind that can understand it) that every circle
contains three hundred and sixty degrees, but if the
geometricians of the future take to milesimal measure-
ments and decide to divide the circle into one thousand
degrees, the three-sixty principle would vanish; of
course, things would still be things if that is what is
meant, but we already know the universe had no
beginning and will have no end, and, therefore, " there
will always and everywhere be matter "; what needs to
be insisted upon is that things considered apart from
thought contain no principles, for a principle must of
necessity be a product of thought plus the things thought
about. If geometricians have referred to such principles
as " properties " of things and then gone on to imagine
the existence of those " properties " independent of
thought, it is time they studied logic.

Space and Time. The idea of space is an abstract
generalisation constructed from sense perceptions
of objects that are extended, such as houses,
tables, etc., and that are said to occupy "space";
there is, of course, no separate entity which consti-
tutes space. The idea of time is constructed in
the same way from sense-perceived successions, such as
one day following another, but there is no "thing"
called "time" after the manner of Bergson. Space
consists of its many parts. Time consists of its many
moments. In each case the abstract unity is constructed
from sense perceptions of concrete realities.

THINKING 145

Force and Matter. Preliminary, Let us once again
insist that the idea of distinguishing between different
parts implies that such parts are parts of one whole,
and, therefore, the universe as a whole is the logical
Starting point in any work of distinguishing. If
we bear this in mind we guard against considering any
part that we have separated and considered as a unit,
as being a whole in itself apart from the rest of the
universe, when in reality it is only our mental arrange-
ment. Idealists have instinctively generalised force or
energy and then treated it as though it was an
altogether distinct and separate kind of thing; they have
spiritualised it in the name of God or intangible Nature,
whereafter it is God who makes railway engines move.
The materialists of the narrow physical science school
have gone the other way. They have mentally separated
the ponderable matter from the force which is part of
it, and then considered this distinction as absolute, with
ponderable matter as the dominant partner in all their
associations; whereafter it is ponderable matter that
causes all things. Both have instinctively performed the
mental separation, but have not been fully aware of what
they have done, and all this because neither under-
stands the science of understanding. Let us now
analyse a few of the ideas occurring under the
head of force.

Gravity. Breaking the idea of gravity into its
parts, we see that the senses perceive parts of ponderable
matter that appear to attract each other; they do not
perceive the general force of gravity, it is the under-
standing that does this by mentally separating these
particular phenomena of seeming attraction from all
other qualities of ponderable matter, and then by adding
them together, that is, generalising them, it constructs
the single idea of gravity and gives it a name. Gravity
as a whole is, therefore, perceived by the understanding
and not by the senses, though the understanding could
not do this if the senses did not perceive the separate
parts of it. In objective reality outside the mind, gravity
consists of the sum total of all its manifestations

146 THINKING

unseparated from the whole of the nature, so it
constitutes one of the parts of matter.

Heat. The idea of heat when analysed shows heat to
be nothing that exists by itself. It is seen as a whole only
by the understanding which takes the separate sense
perceptions of heat, such as those of the sun, a gas jet,
a fire, an electric radiator or the result of any chemical
action, mentally separates these parts from all other
qualities of the sun, etc., and generalises them into one
idea to which it gives the name of heat, thus mentally
distinguishing between heat in general and all the special
or particular parts of it. Of course, there is no such
thing as heat apart from things that are heated, there-
fore, heat in general is an abstraction, while in objective
reality it consists of all its parts undetached from nature ;
accordingly, heat is one of the parts of matter. " Hot "
and " cold " are, of course, relative terms, so they must
be connected with some purpose, that is, we must say
what we are talking about before they can have any
meaning; for example, water at 1050 Fahr. may be hot
for taking a bath but cold for cooking potatoes.

Light and Darkness. What is light? The sense
of sight acquaints us with many manifestations of
light. The understanding takes all these parts, and for
the special purpose of discussing light, mentally
separates them from all else and combines them into one
general unit or idea of light. The senses acquaint us only
with the separate parts, it is the understanding using
these parts as its material that constructs the general
nature of light, that is, light taken as a whole. There
is, of course, no such thing as light existing by itself
and which somehow or other pervades the rest of
nature. In reality, outside the mind, light exists
objectively only in the sum total of all its manifestations
(all the beautiful colours we see), it consists of these
manifestations, it is one of the parts of matter and is,
therefore, not a something unknowable that remains at
the back of the manifestations. Once we know how
understanding performs its understanding it is clear

THINKING 147

that the general conception of light is simply the abstract
or mental form of what exists in the concrete outside
the mind in the totality of its separate manifestations
undetached from matter.

But now, what is darkness? Darkness is the
negation of light, and how can the senses perceive a
negative? If all ideas are based on sense perception
and the senses cannot perceive darkness where do we
get the idea of it? If we remember that every unit, no
matter how small, may he divided into still smaller parts,
we shall see that light may be divided into different
degrees of light, some of which are not so light as
others. Those parts that present the greatest degrees
of light are the parts from which the understanding
constructs the general idea of light; the other parts
which are not so light are the specials for the time
being. But, just in the same way, the understanding
may, if it wishes, take these specials and with them
construct the idea of darkness, which, of course,
constitutes their general nature, and in this case the
greater degrees of light would constitute the special
parts; in other words, what is special in one set of
relationships may be general in others, or, the other way
about. Wherefore, we see that darkness does not mean
no light at all, nor does light imply no darkness at all.
Light is the general nature of a relative lack of darkness,
while darkness is the general nature of a relative lack
of light; relative, that is, to certain purposes, for
example, a certain degree of light might be quite light
for reading large print but dark for taking photographs.

Sound and Silence. Analysing the idea of sound,
we see the sounds of bells, drums, hammering, etc.,
to be separate manifestations of sound perceived
by our sense of hearing. The understanding takes these
separate perceptions or parts, mentally separates the
sounds from all other qualities of the objects, and com-
bines them into one idea, that of sound in general.
Again, this general nature is not perceived by the senses
but by the understanding working with the materia]
supplied by the senses. VVith regard to silence, this idea

148 THINKING

does not arise from an absolute absence of sound, which
obviously could not possibly be sense perceived; but as
the general character of those degrees of sound that are
relatively less noisy.

Motion and Stillness. What is motion? Let us
analyse the idea in just the same way. We see men,
machines, ships, clouds, in short, all kinds of bodies
moving, we feel them moving, we come to know that
all things are in motion. The understanding takes all
these separate sense perceptions as one lot, separates
this lot mentally from all other qualities possessed by
the bodies, and then abstracts the general nature from
all the separate motions, that is, it generalises their
common features into the one idea of motion. It
is, therefore, the understanding that perceives the
general nature of motion, the senses perceive only the
separate parts of it. Outside the mind, motion exists
objectively in the sum total of the movements of all
bodies, and is a part of matter; of course, there is no
separate entity constituting motion, and which, so to
speak, enters bodies or leaves them to go somewhere
else.

Now, how about stillness? Think of a man sitting
still in a railway train going at forty miles an hour on
an earthly sphere that turns a complete revolution about
its axis every twenty-four hours, meanwhile it is whirling
around its orbit at about thirty miles a second, while
some say the whole solar system is rushing headlong
through space. From this it will be evident that stillness
can only be conceived in a relative sense; for example,
a man may sit still in a train in relation to other people
or to the compartment in which he happens to be; or
if two trains are running on adjacent lines in the same
direction at the same speed, except for lateral vibration,
one will be still in relation to the other, and so on;
therefore, the idea of stillness is a generalisation from
sense-perceived parts or instances of relative stillness.
We can hear old-fashioned logic saying, " a thing in
motion is in motion, it is not still, nor is it partly still,"
but our logic can explain how a thing can be still and

THINKING M9

yet in motion at one and the same time, just as a man
inay be living- and dying at the same time.

Something and Nothing. That the idea of some-
thing is a generalisation from sense perceptions of
tilings, surely needs no explanation; but how do we
come by the idea of nothing? If we remember that the
word "nothing" does not mean nothing at all but
refers to those parts of existence that are relatively
unimportant, as, for instance, when we speak of a bit
of dust as being nothing, or a scratch on the hand as
nothing, we shall see that the idea of nothing is simply
a generalisation drawn from those parts of nature that
are unimportant for the time being. This, despite the
horror on the face of "Old Logic," teaches us that
" nothing itself is something," for, considered as only
an abstract generalisation, it is at least a thought, and
thought is real.

Power. If the idea of power be analysed and resolved
into its factors we shall see these to consist of
sun power, horse power, wind power, man power, steam
power, and so on. But, as in previous cases, the senses
never perceive power in its totality. It is the under-
standing, using these sense perceptions as material, that
mentally separates those many parts of power from all
other qualities of the sun, horses, etc., and combines
them into the one idea of power in general. Outside
the mind, the total power consists of all the special parts
of power, which are unseparated from objects and
accordingly form part of them; there is no other power,
SO the idea of an Almighty power existing independently
of nature, and which supplies power to nature, becomes
a futility once we see that " universal power " is a mental
concept built up from sense-perceived parts and that
the parts are prior to the concept. Were there any other
power different from what we knozv as power, it would
require a different name to describe it, consequently it
would not be power.

Force and Matter. Concluded. If heat, light, sound,
feeling, seeing (sense stimuli), gravity, etc., are so

150 THINKING

many different manifestations of force, what is force
itself? The physicists say we do not know, we only
know its effects; they also say we do not know the
ultimate nature of matter, though in recent years, by
the electron theory already mentioned, they have
resolved the atom into several thousands of electrons,
supposed to be the product of electrical forces which
neutralise each other and so produce points of electrical
inertia expressing themselves as matter in the form of
electrons. So matter is materialised energy, and energy
is energised matter, the immaterial forces become
material substances and vice versa; but, withal, we do
not know the ultimate nature of the energy which lies
at the back of its manifestations.

Now let us apply our logic. Every idea is composed
of parts supplied by sense perception; the idea of force
or energy is no exception. The special parts of the idea,
or rather a few of them, we have already worked
through, they consist of heat, light, power, etc. All
these separate generalisations, based ultimately on
sense perceptions, are taken by the understanding and
treated by it as parts of a still wider generalisation which
takes the form of force in total. But this total, or
general force, does not exist apart from matter, it is
not a separate entity that enters matter at one time and
leaves it at another. It is only the mind's way of making
distinctions that gives rise to that idea, for if we
remember that matter consists of all its attributes taken
together and that all these forces are just such
attributes (matter without force is like matter without
shape), it becomes plain that force in total is the same
as matter in total, consequently there is nothing at all
lying at the back of the manifestations of force, because
it consists of those manifestations themselves. If we
are dealing with the subject of force, we speak of
material forces wherein matter is the predicate and
force the subject; but if dealing with the subject of
matter we speak of forceful matter, wherein force
becomes the predicate and matter the subject; from
which it should be clear that force is the same thing
we call material nature, or the universe, the existence

THINKING 151

of which nobody doubts, because all know it to be a
fact. What we seek to understand is not existence

independent of the parts of existence which, of course,
is nonsense, but the relations between those parts.

Scientists have long since done away with the supreme
mind of God, but they are just as much at sea as
theologians when dealing with the ultimate nature of
force, including the human mind, particularly as it
appears in the realms of morality, reason, spirit, the
true, the good, the beautiful, etc. Not knowing lei'-,
they operate in their own special sciences practically,
that is, correctly as far as practice goes, but not with a
full and consciously-applied theory of method; outside
their own speciality, they do not work right even in
practice. Even the ordinary working" class reader (for
whom this book has been written) may say regarding
such examples of reasoning as water being hot for some
purposes but cold for others, or it being light for
reading but dark for photography, that this book tells
him nothing, because he has already reasoned that way.
Probably he is quite correct, for most people argue or
reason well enough on small everyday matters, but,
since they do not understand the theory of thinking, they
do not see that exactly the same method should be
employed in treating all questions, for just as what is
hot for some things may be cold for others, so may
some things be right for some people and zurong for
others, and if the working class did its own thinking and
employed for that purpose a scientific method of
approaching every question, they would soon cease to
be hoodwinked by the master class through accepting
the point of view given them (often by leading scientists)
in the daily press, the cinema, the church, the lecture-
room, the political clubs and the trade union branch
meeting, not to speak of wireless broadcasting; but, of
rights and wrongs we shall see more in the next chapter.

CHAPTER XI

Logic applied to Mental and Moral Problems

Every truth must be the truth concerning something,
otherwise it has no meaning and is no truth at all. In
searching for the truth of anything we have, therefore,
to first make clear what it is we are talking about, what
the thing is, the purpose in view, etc., and then, with
everything considered, to abstract the general nature
or general agreement between the factors ; if in this
process we mentally combine too few factors our
generalisation falls short of what is combinable outside
the mind, or, to be more correct, in objective reality
(thought itself may be objective), and we get error; if
we take too many factors our generalisation overshoots
the mark of objective reality, and again we get error.
Assuming the reader agrees with the principles taught
in the last two chapters and is prepared to apply the
same method to all questions, we now proceed to
consider a few mental and moral problems that are not
usually treated scientifically, for it is in the field of the
moral nature of man's reason where the greatest con-
tention rages and where little or no science is applied.
Take, first, the question of the reasonable.

The Reasonable. How do men know what is reason-
able when they argue that five per cent, profit is
reasonable, or that a certain standard of life is reason-
able, or that the demands of capitalists are reasonable,
or that workers demand unreasonably high wages, or
that the present chaotic state of the world can never
be set straight till men act towards each other with " a
bit of reason"; what is the basis of their argument?

152

THINKING 153

Since the understanding cannot operate without the
senses, and the senses cannot function unless in contact
with reality, it is clear that men, if they reason at all,
must reason about things, and naturally they look upon
things from the standpoint of whether or not they serve
some need; man's needs, therefore, lie at the bottom of
man's reason. Things that serve some need are sense
perceived, and from such perceptions the understanding
generalises the idea of the "reasonable"; while from
sense perceptions of things that serve in a contrary
direction the understanding generalises the idea of the
" unreasonable." For example, on warm summer days
men do not need to wear double-breasted overcoats; it
would, therefore, be just as unreasonable to wear them
at such times as it would be to neglect them in excep-
tionally cold weather. But it might be reasonable for
an invalid to wear such a coat in summer, though his
would be a special case; in like manner some individual
might not need one even in cold weather, in which case
it would be reasonable for him to go without, for again
this would be a special case. Viewed in this way, that
which is reasonable depends upon the needs of certain
persons with all the conditions taken into account; vary
the needs of the people, the times or the general
conditions, and what was formerly reasonable will
become unreasonable ; accordingly, since the needs of
different people are widely different, there can be no
one thing or policy that is reasonable for all people at
all times under all conditions.

To say it would be reasonable for all men to wear
great coats on warm days because it was reasonable for
the invalid to do so would be an error, because it would
be making the special case into the general, it would be
taking fewer factors than would be required to agree
with reality. Truth being that statement that expresses
the generality concerning any quantity of sense percep-
tions, it follows that it would be truly reasonable for the
invalid to wear the coat because we are dealing only
with his needs; the truth in this case would be a
generalisation drawn from a small number of sense
perceptions. Should we take a greater number of

154 THINKING

sense perceptions by considering- the needs of people
in general, it would be unreasonable to say they
should all wear such coats at such times, because the
invalid's case, although a general if taken by itself,
becomes a special when taken in relation to a wider
general.

Take another instance; the needs of people in general
may be collectively expressed as the need to improve
their position in life. Under the wages system, wage-
workers need more wages to carry out this improvement,
and this need leads them possibly to strike. But
employers need more profits, which lead them to reduce
wages and possibly to lock the workers out. Each
section generalises its own needs, and what is reasonable
for one is unreasonable for the other. So it is plain that
the reasonable is reasonable only in relation to certain
persons at certain times and under definite conditions;
it is impossible for there to be anything that is
universally reasonable under all conditions and for all
persons. Moreover, since the needs of a small number
of people within a given group constitute the special
or unimportant needs as compared with the general
needs of the group, it would be unreasonable for the
smaller section to represent its special needs as being
the general. On the other hand, if the larger section
were too lavish in their generalising and included factors
that were not applicable to their given problem, then
their generalisation would not correspond with
objective reality, it would be too general for the
given circumstances; for example, if the majority of
members of a trade union passed a resolution to the
effect that reductions in wages were in the interest of
both masters and men, or, if they preach that in general
the interests of masters and men are alike, since the
separate needs of masters on the one hand and workers
on the other cannot be combined in general practice,
such resolution or teaching is unreasonable, because
more factors have been generalised inside the mind
than can possibly be so in reality. To strive to reconcile
capitalists and workers is unreasonable, because it is
not in accord with objective reality (the capitalists deny

THINKING 155

this, bill that is bluff), though it may be reasonable to
attempt reconciliation after the contradiction of private
ownership in means of production has been solved by
social ownership, and the capitalist has become a mere
man, that is. when the conditions have changed,
but that, it must be borne in mind, is a different
problem.

Take now an example of a different kind. Rationalists
tell us it is unreasonable to believe in God, a future
life, miracles, and so on. These people evidently do
not understand logic; they imagine they get reason
without sense perceptions, or, if they do not go quite
SO far as that, they at least elevate their own particular
reason into reason in general. I lowever, the people who
worship God feel the need for prayer just as children
feel the need for fairy stories, and in both cases it is
a product of their reason that they should satisfy their
need. Even a man who understands logic might quite
reasonably read a book of fanciful poems, or go to a
fanciful opera, or to a church service if he likes those
things and gets some degree of satisfaction from them,
but it would not be reasonable to attempt to solve
political and economic questions with the information
usually got from such sources, because, although it
does not matter to the rest of men how he reasons
privately or semi-privately among a small group, those
reasons are small, unimportant, particular or special
generalisations when considered in relation to politics
and economics, for that which is reasonable in the latter
spheres depends upon the needs of large groups, so, the
political and economic needs being the more widely
general, it becomes unreasonable to obtrude special
religious notions; wherefore, we see once more that
what is reasonable under some conditions, because
general, becomes unreasonable under other conditions
through having become the special in relation to a
wider general. Since there mav be readers who object
tn the idea of God's Holy religion being brought to the
level of mere poetry or fairy lore, and who are still of
the opinion that "sweet reasonableness" comes from
on High and constitutes obedience to God's commands.

156 THINKING

it may be advisable to work through a few of the ideas
contained in the greater idea of God.

Life. What is life ? According to Genesis, God
formed man out of clay. After finishing the model,
" God saw that ... it was very good," so He
breathed " life " into it, whereupon the model became
Adam. When Adam's body died, the breath of life
departed and winged its way back to God; in fact, it
belonged to God, or, rather, was part of Him all along.

This crude form of the idea has long since been
discredited, nevertheless its essential character remains
in many different forms, for modern philosophers are
asking the questions, " What is life" ? and " Why do we
ascribe life to the living " ? They seem to imagine that
life is an entity of some kind that comes from some-
where, enters the body during the pre-natal period, only
to leave it at death to go on living in some region after
the body dies. Of course, there are variations on this
theme, for some think of a soul that is not the life itself
but which possesses life, though in actual conception
there is little difference inasmuch as most people speak-
indiscriminately of the " immortal soul " and " immortal
life."

The idea of life, like all ideas, is built up of parts
consisting of sense perceptions of the many separate
instances of life, such as animals, trees, microbes, etc. ;
the brain separates the sense perceptions of life from
the sense perceptions of all other qualities of the
animals, etc.. and generalises them into the one idea of
life in total. Life is not a thing, but a function of matter,
and the understanding gives this function a name to
distinguish it from other functions of matter.

In reality, outside the mind, life consists of the sum
total of the many different instances of life. There is
no separate thing called " life " that may enter the body,
or leave it and still go on living. Such an idea is a mere
mental abstraction, a unity that exists in the mind only,
there being no corresponding unity outside the mind.

Through not understanding how the brain works,
people have performed the generalisation practically,

THINK IXC 157

but have not understood it theoretically; this has led

them to treat the abstraction as an entity. SO it 1- no
longer wonderful to find thai living things have." life,"
indeed it would be peculiar if we did not ascribe life to
the living seeing that we get our general idea of it from
sense perceptions of those same living things- Looked
at like this it is no more wonderful that certain combina-
tions of matter should exhibit the function called life
than that other combinations should exhibit other
functions; for example, that a Inciter match should burst
into flame on being scratched by sand paper; each
particular combination of matter exhibits its particular
function, so we employ different names to describe the
different function--.

Every part of matter changes the manner of its
functioning with every change in its physical constitu-
tion; for example, a man's body is gradually dying at
the same time that it is living, but we distinguish
between living and dying by separating the special from
the general. If a body is building up new parts more
quickly than old parts decay (both processes are results
of changes in its physical constitution), the building-up
process is more general than the decaying process, so
the decaying relates to a smaller quantity of material
changes, it is consequently the special in this case, and
we say truly that the body is living because that is its
general character. After a body has reached maturity it
begins to decay more rapidly than it builds up; it is then
in the dying stage, because the decay is becoming more
general than its opposite; when the decay has reached
such a point that building up in the form of that
particular organism ceases, then the dying process has
become very general, and we truly state the body to be
dead. We should never forget that decay itself is but
the building up of new forms of matter. University logic
would say life is not death, nor is it partly so, for life
and death are opposite terms; but our logic shows them
to be one process, the different parts of which are
separated entirely by the mind working with sense
perceptions. To ask " what is the ' life force ' apart from
the remainder of living matter " is like asking " what is

158 THINKING

explosive force apart from matter that is exploding, or
freezing force apart from ice " ?

Robert Blatchf ord has quite recently again made the old
remark, that when a man is struck dead with a cannon
ball the chemical elements are still there but the body is
no longer living, and asks, " What is it that has gone " ?
We answer, it is the particular arrangement of the parts
that has gone, which arrangement was necessary to
enable the chemicals to function in the way we describe
as living, just as in case the cannon ball had struck a
house and reduced it to ruins, the bricks and mortar
would still be there but lack of the required arrangement
would prevent them from functioning by way of giving
shelter (in ridicule we might even ask what has
become of the " shelter " apart from the bricks and
mortar — shall we meet it again in the Great Beyond ?).
In the former case we no longer call the body a
man, nor in the latter case do we call the bricks and
mortar a house, because in each case the general nature
has been changed, and so we require a different name to
describe it. If the argument be advanced that we could
rebuild the house but not the man, we should say this
was merely a question of the extent of the damage in
either case, coupled with the relative skill on the part
of the doctors and of the builders. In case the damage
is too extensive to be repaired, a new house might
be built, or a new man be produced, by taking the
action appropriate in either case.

Immortality. This idea has for its parts just the
same as life, but with other parts added to them, such
as the continuity of functioning running through living
organisms taken as a whole throughout history, the
desire of every conscious organism to live as long as
it can, the desire for continued companionship, the idea
of a stable condition of things which takes no notice
of the continual change, the desire for rest and peace
when one feels tired of work, the hurly-burly of life or
the agony of prolonged sickness and suffering, and so
on. When a man says " I wish I were dead " he means
(usually) nothing of the kind, rather does he feel a desire

THINKING 159

to be free from his present trouble, and if the only
possible way is by parting with his body, then he is
willing to pa] thai price, Dili he has the idea of still
going nn living. We, therefore, see the idea of Immor-
tality to be an abstract generalisation from sense
perceptions of parts of the universal being that are not
eneralised outside the mind; it is consequently an
error.

Perfection. In life, people perceive by the aid
of their senses that some machines work more accurately
than others; that some persons are more refined than
others, or more generally useful to society, nicer to get
on with, easier to talk to, and so on; that some books
as compared with others are easier to read and contain
more beautiful language; also a thousand-and-one other
excellences. Now, it will he quite evident that what is
desirable or nice for one person will not be equally so
for all. Each person takes his own circle of sense
perceptions, singles out what is for him the generally
desirable, and calls it the perfect, whereafter this
becomes his standard of perfection, while his standard of
imperfection consists of the general character of the
undesirable. There are, of course, no such things as
" perfection " in itself, " beauty " in itself, " good " in
itself, and so on; otherwise we might ask " Why have
last year's beautiful fashions become ugly"?

But these individual concepts are not the* end of the
question, for such separate generalisations come in
conflict with one another through conversation or
comparisons of various kinds, thereby leading to a more
extended idea which becomes a generalisation drawn
from a wider circle; it may be in style of dress, manner
of address, style of writing, deportment, knowledge,
etc. From all these separate and relatively small
generalisations, there are brains that generalise the idea
of a complete and absolute perfection contrasted with its
opposite complete imperfection.

With our explanation we see these latter ideas to be
mere mental abstractions, the unity exists in the mind
only, there being no corresponding unity outside the

160 THINKING

mind. It is not the senses that perceive perfection but
the understanding-, though it could not do this without
the material supplied by the senses. Outside the mind
the only perfection that exists is contained in the many
concrete instances of perfection which themselves
consist of small mental generalisations of sense-perceived
facts, having for their base that which is admirable
because desirable. Therefore, human wants lie at the
bottom of the absolutely perfect, it being nothing but
the abstract mental reflection of the general desires of
mankind.

Freedom and Will. What is freedom? By their
senses men perceive that they may move from place
to place, they may write letters, they may make
wealth, they may be lazy, etc. Throughout all such-like
they feel they are choosing one line of action in prefer-
ence to another, and when they have done something
they feel they could have done otherwise had they
wished, and that accordingly they are free to choose;
from all these sense perceptions the understanding
generalises the idea of freedom. But what are sense
perceptions ? Do they not imply a relation between that
which perceives and that which is perceived ? Evidently
these apparently free acts are expressions of the
relations between the individual and the rest of nature
and his acts are a product of both. This being so they
cannot be called free any more than a cork can be called
free when, on being released at the bottom of a tank of
water, it rises to the surface. The movement of the cork
is determined (not pre-determined) by both itself and the
water, and so are men's acts determined in like manner.

Man's needs, again, lie at the bottom of this question ;
he requires the necessaries of life, and in order to live
it is necessary that he exert himself to get them. This
necessary exertion is already implied in the fact of
existence for without such striving there would be no
existence at all, the idea of existence is but the abstract
form of all that is. Man's acts are, therefore, nothing
but the carrying into effect of all the necessary relations
between himself and the rest of nature, and are

THINKING 161

consequently determined at each given moment This
nty appears in the form of a series of impulses to
do certain things; those impulses that are strongest
within a man at any given moment are executed,
provided there are no combinations of outside forces
sufficient to stop him; at these times he experiences the
feeling of freedom and, of course, in the reverse case,
lack of freedom. Since only those impulses that are
Strongest or quantitatively superior can prevail, it
follows again that the expression of what is called the
" human will *' is only the expression of the general over
the particular. From separate sense perceptions of
numerous carryings out of such strong impulses, the
understanding generalises the idea of the human
" will," whereafter that generalisation is regarded as a
mysterious entity, and is called the " will "; but we see
there is no such entity in reality, either outside the mind
or even inside, except the mental abstraction.

Since all things are necessary parts of existence,
" freedom " is nothing but a name for the expression of
the strongest forces, and is, of course, relative to those
forces. For example, each rising political class makes
its demands in the name of " freedom " or " liberty" as
an appeal to an "eternal" principle; when it gets
sufficient force to achieve power it is said to have
acquired freedom, whereafter it styles its particular
country a " free " country, while it itself becomes
conservative in order to preserve its own particular
brand of freedom. Since any particular freedom is
conditioned by force, so-called unconditional freedom
such as is implied in the Holy Will of God is an error,
it is the elevation of numerous particular wills into the
general, which is afterwards considered as detached
from and independent of nature.

As thought is one of the material parts of man, and
as a man at any given moment is simply a combination
of material factors which must act according to its
constitution, then to give a man a new thought
obviously varies the combination, and so will he act in a
different way (thinking is an act), just as will gun
powder, in the presence of a spark, act in different trays

L

162 THINKING

according- to whether or not it is combined with water.
Assuming a thousand impulses to act in a certain way,
and a similar number of similar strength to act in some
other definite way, equilibrium takes place regarding
those particular ways of acting, though one additional
impulse on either side may be enough to upset the
balance. This principle may be seen at work in
propaganda, education, advertising, scolding, hyp-
notism, etc., etc. In all these cases the acting principle
is that of suggestion, either auto or non-auto, and it
would seem that those modern psychologists, who are
interested in what has been erroneously called
" Coueism," are coming to realise this when they ask
" is the imagination (thought) stronger than the will? "

If the foregoing is true, then it becomes quite
scientific to tell oneself repeatedly what one intends or
wishes to do, for as soon as the repeated stimulus has
acquired sufficient accumulated subconscious strength,
or developed a new neurone pattern, the individual
must respond, of course within the limits to which
thought is operative, for we must remember that
thought is only one part of the universe. Faith
considered as faith has nothing to do with the matter,
but considered as thought it is operative like all
thought.

The writer feels that the sooner psychologists drop
the "will" overboard the better; there will then be a
clear field in which to develop the practice of suggestion
on scientific lines, the inapplicability of the idea of
" will " is at present a stumbling block.

Knowledge. What is knowledge ? The idea of
knowledge is a generalisation drawn from sense
perceptions of the different parts of knowledge
possessed by everybody and everything that knows
anything at all, that is clear. From our previous work
it will also be clear that there is no knowledge without
sense perception; for there is no other kind of know-
ledge besides that which we know as knowledge, if there
were it would require a different name, and consequently
would not be knowledge. Again, knowledge can only

THINK IXC, 163

l)c known by brains that are dependent on sense
perceived material, otherwise knowledge would be the
knowledge of nothing; so there can be no knowledge of
all the past and the future, that is, of eternity " from the
beginning unto the end."

God. To analyse the idea of God we must follow
the rules of our logic in just the same manner as before.
We think of God as being the source of life, or as being
life itself; as being without beginning or end. and there-
fore immortal; as being completely perfect; as being
that which is all good; as being omnipotent or all
powerful, omniscient or all knowing, and omnipresent
or everywhere at once; as being eternally just, eternally
loving, eternally merciful, eternally angry, eternally
mild and, at least as far as Christians are concerned, as
having the form of a human being inasmuch as " God
made man in his own image." Now realising that all
ideas must necessarily be based upon sense perceptions,
we see that God is a mental generalisation of a great
number of smaller generalisations, all of which we have
seen to consist, in their parts, of the abstract form of
man's material relations between himself and other
natural objects. And since this mental combination
does not exist as a combination outside the human head,
notwithstanding that its parts exist and are separately
sense perceived, it follows that we perceive God with
our understanding merely as an abstraction. See Fig. 5.
He is, in fact, abstract man carried to infinity; so we
may truly say that " Man made God in his own image."

Morality and Right. ( )ur logic is the one and
only guide that can conduct us safely through the
maze of the moral. In war time it is right to kill, to tell
lies about the enemy, etc. ; in peace time it is considered
wrong. Polygamy is moral in Eastern countries, in
Western countries it is immoral. But among the many
notions of morality there is one general outstanding
feature common to them all — they all serve some
general need pertaining to a certain society or group
within a society; and if we take any such group, consider

1 64

THINKING

its interests and find out what is its general need, we
shall have found what is truly moral for that particular
group.

Let us start with one man. If a man lives entirely by
himself he makes his own morals, or to be more correct,

bense perceptions
of

Thmkinq oK.^ ,^Lwinq men
%\ ""J/'-Continuity

Thmkinq of-___

■Immortal Life

Ihinkmq of~-.^ ..-Beauty

Accuracy
Utility
etc.*

-Infinite Perfection

Trunkinq ot-._ ".-Kindness
-Justice
Pi evidence

elc.

Infinite Goodness

T>i mkinq of-.. "-Gravity

;J-lumanWil
" Storms
etc.

Intuition
nsfmcf
."lnfelliqence
etc

Infinite Knowledge

All Miqhty

Fig- 5- Diagrammatic suggestion of the construction of the
thought of God, from sense perceptions of objective reality.

the question of morality as generally, and therefore
truly, understood does not arise, for the reason that he
cannot have any relations with other people. But, if he
lives with another man they each have to respect the
other's needs, and if one is a pugilist while the other is
a weakling, then, in any matter of dispute, the morality

THINKING 165

is finally dictated by the pugilist; though if the work fir,
maybe, the companionship of (he weakling is necessary
for the well being of the pugilist, the pugilist must take
this into consideration for his own sake. While each
man has likes and dislikes peculiar to himself, these are
only special needs and do not count, it is therefore their
common or general needs that determine their morality,
and this at any moment of serious difference between
them turns upon the will of the pugilist, because he is
able to coerce his partner if necessary (" I'm the boss
here, I'll tell you what's right "). Coercion, though,
is not always pugilistic in character; it might be that the
weakling is a weakling in the body, but very cunning
and superior mentally (analogous to the capitalist class
and the working class). Assuming this, it would be
possible for him to demonstrate his mental might by
"educating" the pugilist "in the way he should go,"
unless the pugilist should "educate himself" from his
own standpoint. In either case, whichever particular
morality obtained, it would only be the mental
generalisation of sense perceptions which, of course,
depend upon the material conditions governing their
lives; should these change the morality changes. It is
evident, then, there is no morality that is right for all
people and for all time.

To take another example. We go to the theatre,
where we are in company with a number of people who
desire entertainment, and have therefore a common
need. If among the audience there should be a drunken
man, who persists in being a nuisance, the general body
assert their morality in calling for his removal, and, if
necessary, that morality is demonstrated by the man
being forcibly ejected.

That which is moral is, accordingly, that which serves
the general needs of certain groups of people at certain
times and places; and the nature of morality is the
upholding of the general interest over the particular.

As sense perceptions vary with variations in the
material or economic conditions to which different
nations at the same time or the same nation at different
times are subject, so do different moralities exist as

166 THINKING

between different countries at the same time or within a
given country at different times (the same remarks apply-
to different classes within a country). For example, the
morality of the Dark Ages was that of the Catholic
Church and Feudal Barons, and its might consisted
theoretically of the threat of Hell, and practically of the
sword and torture. When the Church and the nobles
were in the strongest position they were the dictators,
as an instance, usury was immoral; but when the
economic mode of production changed and brought
development of trade, there arose new needs based on
the new material conditions. The old nobility fought
to retain its supremacy, but as the rising capitalist class
increased in numbers their growing might gradually
asserted itself; this might was that of monetary power,
which, with the need for foreign markets in which to
dispose of the increased product of machine work,
translated itself into extensions of military and naval
power culminating in imperialism and " the honour of
the Flag." All these changes were accompanied by
different moralities; for example, with the banking
system, usury became moral, at least to the extent of
the usual rate of interest; the virtues included thrift and
abstinence, solvency for those who paid and bravery for
those who fought, and all this, be it remembered, in the
name of the Holy will of God. Each powerful class
claims that its morality is based upon " eternal " right,
" eternal " justice, and so on; but our logic exposes the
fact that there is no " eternal " or " absolute right," it
shows us that morality is relative to persons, times and
places, for every so-called " absolute right " is really
the might of a particular class enforcing its particular
desires regarding its particular needs. From this it will
be easily seen how powerful can be the lever of
education in the hands of a governing class, and also
how necessary it is for the working class to educate
itself from its own particular standpoint.

In so far as the development of capitalism is ever
increasing the number of workers, and relatively
thinning the ranks of the capitalists, so are the needs
of the capitalist class becoming the particular, while the

THINKING K'7

needs of the working class are becoming the general.
Working class morality is slowly taking form, but

before it can obtain general recognition it will have to
be expressed in the economic might of the workers in
expropriating the capitalists by socialising the means of
production. This is why capitalists arc so desperately
anxious to " educate " the working class in the direction
of conciliation and " impartiality."

Holiness. Since morality is determined by the
superior power or might of the general over the
particular, then the general needs become the end in
view, and, provided the end as conceived in the abstract
is a correct generalisation of the general needs, which
correctness can only be attained by a study of all the
factors concerned, so may we say that the end is
justified. ( >f course, there is no such thing as an end
considered by itself, for like every other single idea, the
idea of an end is built up of sense perceptions.
consequently all " ends " are constructed by the under-
standing in relation to the material conditions out of
which they are generalised.

So also with the idea of the " means " to attain a given
"end." If the end is justified, so are the means; but
since the end in view cannot be attained without the
necessary means, we see that the end when realised is
only the sum of all its means taken together,
consequently means do not exist in themselves, but arc
only means when taken in relation to some definite end,
for should the end in view not he realised, then what
were expected to be the means to that end never
become means, therefore means are only relative.

If human welfare be taken as the end in view, then all
actions toward that end become means, and the end
being the whole welfare, is the I loly. But if we analyse
the idea of the whole well-being of the human race, we
find it to be composed of parts; for example, the
production of food, clothing, entertainment, the
acquisition of knowledge, etc. These parts are the
means of attaining the cm\ in view, and taken altogether
constitute that end. Though if we take one of those

168 THINKING

parts or " means " and consider it by itself, we find it
is an "end" which has its own special means; for
example, taking the production of food as the end in
view, its parts or means consist of the separate acts
involved in agriculture, cattle raising, and so on.
Therefore, the relatively small or particular means of
agriculture, etc., taken together constitute the "end"
of food production, and likewise the particular means
employed in science, taken together, constitute the
" end " in view, science. But food and science, which
are " ends " in relation to their special means, them-
selves become the " means " of the greater " end " of
human welfare. So, the whole welfare of the human
race, or the Holy, is the only absolute end. all other
ends being relative. Wherefore it follows that if any
group of persons having a special end in view call it the
Holy, they are wrong, and the means they employ are
wrong. For example, the end that capitalists have in
view is profit, and the means they employ are the private
ownership of factories, tools, etc., and the purchase of
labour power. These factors express themselves in
capitalist politics, capitalist authority, the capitalist
State, capitalist law, capitalist war, and capitalist
education for workers, inculcating the doctrines of
thrift, increased production, fighting for the Flag, etc.,
but, above all, hard work for relatively low wages. " It
is the holy will of God that the poor must work." " It
is a grievous wrong and a sin to attack the sanctity of
private property." But evidently, since the end in view,
namely, profit, can only serve the need of a particular
class, then it cannot be general or whole, or Holy.
Although capital was justified in its day because it made
wealth to flow like water, and so tended as a step
towards the ultimate general good, it is no longer
justified, because it is holding back the general product
from the general mass of the people who produce it.
Therefore, if profit as an end in view is no longer
justified, neither are its means, the private ownership of
the property used in producing it, or, in a word, the
wages system.

Here more than anywhere else we see the necessity of

THINKING 169

teaching logic to the working class, and also the reason
why university professors, who In-long directly or
indirectly to the capitalist class, dare not teach it. " It
is a holy and a wholesome thought " not "to pray for
the dead," hut to teach the living, though almost
starving, mass of workers to reject the spurious
Holiness offered them by their masters, whether in
press, pulpit or parliament.

CHAPTER XII

Various Examples of Applied Logic

One who adopts the Science of Understanding as
outlined in the last three chapters will agree that no
single thought is possible without a basis of sense
perception, and, therefore, to trace our thoughts back
far enough, invariably ends in establishing the relation-
ship that always exists between the knowing brain and
the object which is known. The method is very simple,
but the acquisition of material upon which to use it
means work, as it involves a study of all those things we
wish to examine, for without the necessary material we
are left guessing, and the difference between guessing
and science is, of course, the difference between
chancing our luck and certainty. The scientific method
consists of splitting every question into its essential
ideas, then splitting each idea into its sense perceived
parts and comparing our mental work with what exists
outside the mind, that is, comparing the abstract
existence of things with their concrete existence. By
this means we may see which generalisations are
objectively possible and which are not, or, in other
words, the difference between the general and the
special, or, again, between truth and error. Having
learned the method, we now proceed to apply it to those
questions tabulated in the first chapter, not as yet
answered; in doing this it is, of course, assumed that the
reader is sufficiently familiar with economic and social
science.

What is True Democracy ? Here are two ideas,
"truth" and "democracy." Truth is that which is

170

THINKING 171

general wit Inn a given circle, so much we already
know. Democracy means the rule of the people, or
tli.it the whole of the people rule themselves. But,
dividing this idea into its parts, we see it to be
ini| ossicle as an objective generalisation, for how can
the people be said to rule themselves while they are
divided into two classes, workers and capitalists, whose
separate general needs are opposed? It must of
necessity be the rule of one class. The voting of the
working class, although it constitutes a small mental
training for the future, nevertheless, at present is no
more than a hoodwinking device, and must remain so
till the might is abolished that arises from the private
ownership of the means of production (factories,
railways, etc), upon which is based capitalist morality.
This morality preaches the sanctity and inviolability of
such private property. The capitalist class accordingly
elevates a partial good, the realisation of its 0101 general
needs into the general good of all people, and
hypocritically preaches the idea of democracy as one of
the means towards its own end.

There is, therefore, no such thing as true democracy,
nor can there be under class rule. The idea exists as a
generalised abstraction in people's minds; it is based
upon facts that are sense perceived, but since these facts
are not capable of being generalised outside the mind
so long as capitalism lasts, the generalisation is for the
present untrue because it is too general for the existing
conditions.

Would the Practice of Humanitarian Principles be
good for Society? This question presupposes (1) that
general humanitarian principles exist, (2) that we can
at the present time speak intelligently of the good of
society, and (3) that the practice of such assumed
principles is possible.

(11 "Humanitarian principles" are mental abstrac-
tions based upon sense perceived facts that relate to
human beings. Since the material conditions of various
groups are very different from each other, so are their
sense perceptions, and likewise consequently their

172 THINKING

mental generalisations, as witness those of Englishmen,
Turks, Negroes, and so on; from the various partial
generalisations the understanding draws a wider
generalisation, that of the abstract " absolutely humani-
tarian," which has no corresponding existence outside
the mind ; the parts of it exist outside the mind, but not
the combination, it is therefore too general.

(2) The " good of society " is another abstraction to
which the same remarks apply.

(3) Since no abstract idea can be put into practice
unless it corresponds with reality outside the mind, it
follows that even within these limits the practice of
humanitarian principles turns, not upon their being
humanitarian, but upon the material conditions
obtaining at any given time; and if the advocates of
such humanitarianism wish to show the superiority of
their principles they must be prepared to enforce them
and to demonstrate their morality by might.

Of course, just as a certain group think their special
ideas are correct because they are in accord with the
"eternal principles of truth and humanity," so do
groups whose interests lie in the opposite direction
appeal to the same principles to justify their opposition,
which shows that the principles advocated by each
group, when reduced to the concrete, are special to each
group. Each calls them the general and tries to bluff
the other by speaking of them as Holy, that is,
pertaining to the whole, when in reality they are partial,
and have to rest upon force for their application. To
say " if one man holds such principles, so could all men
if only they would " ignores the fact that ideas are
determined by material conditions, which include the
faculty of thinking, so that we cannot ourselves choose
what we think. Therefore, humanitarian principles,
considered in the light of what is ordinarily meant when
the term is used, are simply beautiful soap bubbles
requiring nothing beyond our logic to demonstrate their
emptiness.

With regard to the application of Christian principles
in solving social problems, the same remarks apply.
Since Christian principles emanate from a sect,

THINKING 173

"advanced" thinkers and orators throw them over-
board as being too narrow, they claim thai their ideas
are not the silly sectarian ones, but are broad-based on

the principles of humanity, and so do they succeed in
showing the same kind of silliness in the lump.

All ideals have a material base, whether they be true
or false, but they are useful only when they correspond
with those material conditions that may make their
realisation possible. Outside this, they may be pleasant
dreams and quite harmless, provided they are not taken
seriously; but when they are, much waste of time
ensues, and they become a sub-conscious but impractic-
able nuisance. Our logic, it must be remembered, does
not exclude the delights of poetic or even political
imagination, such as communistic thoughts of the
future or I.L.P. policies with regard to the present, but
simply shows such imagination in its true light, thereby
keeping it from clogging the wheels of practical affairs.
True enough, without imagination much would be
missed, but, then, many things are better missed, so we
should learn to discriminate.

Is Education good for the Working Class? Educa
tion is a means to an end, if the end is justified,
so are the means; here we have to split up the
ideas of " education " considered as a means, and
" the good of the working class " considered as an end ;
and an end to be good must serve some need.

We know that workers need to live, as do non-
workers; and that progress consists in maintaining or
improving a given standard of comfort, intellectual or
otherwise, with an ever decreasing expenditure of
energy; consequently all education that tends towards
this end is good for the working class. But we also
know that in capitalist countries the people are divided
into the capitalist class and the working class.
Capitalists, living without producing wealth, have needs
opposed to those of the workers, and since they control
all general education they necessarily permeate that
education with ideas that serve their class needs, because
those ideas necessarily appear to them as good; there-

174 THINKING

fore, while the general nature of education is good for
workers, that special permeation is bad.

To counteract this capitalist speciality, it is necessary
for workers to develop a type of education consistent
with their own special needs, at the same time that they
partake of education in its more general character. Our
logic shows that both these special types of education
are small generalisations which, being opposed in
practice, cannot be unified, though the abstract unity
may obtain inside the mind as an error; nor at the
present time can either speciality taken separately be an
integral part of the general. Each class strives to
demonstrate the truth of its special generalisation, the
one conservative the other revolutionary. Now, owing
to the inexorable working of economic laws, whereby
the working class are becoming more numerous and
more dependent, the workers' educational speciality is
gradually becoming more and more general; it leads to
an abstract ideal of the social ownership of factories,
tools, materials, and the mechanism of distribution and
exchange. Whenever this ideal is realised in the
concrete, the special working-class character of
education (excluding the purely propagandist sides) will
become part of general education, and thereby its truth
will be demonstrated. The education given to workers
by capitalists is conservative as considered from
their special standpoint, while pretending to be
impartial, because it tends to confuse the issue between
the two classes, but they cannot help it being
progressive considered from general standpoints; this
essential contradiction will be solved by the conservative
side being exposed as a result of the progressive
element enabling workers to read for themselves.

We may conclude, then, that the general education
which tends towards greater production with less expen-
diture of energy, is good for workers when separated
from the special capitalist ideas running through
it, because it makes for general progress; but for the
same reason special, partial or Independent Working-
Class Education is good for workers because, first, it
leads to a more correct generalisation of their own

THINKING 175

special needs, and, second, shows that as economic
development proceeds, it must eventually become part
of a wider general. Consequently the special capitalist
class character of general education is wrong for

workers, because it persists in elevating the former's

special interests or special good into the general good
which it can never become.

// Socialism is bound to come of what use are Classes
in Social Science? This question pre-supposes for the
sake ot" argument that the human will is determined or
not free, or to put it another way, that the idea of " the
will '* i- nothing but a mental generalisation from sense
perceived impulses just as we have previously described,
and then by implication goes on to suppose that we have
free wills and could sit down and do nothing by using
those wills. The fallacy exists in the question itself.

If all our acts are determined, so are the acts of class
teaching determined, and those who are so constituted,
other conditions permitting, cannot avoid conducting
classes. Of course, we could, and as a matter of fact
would, sit down and do nothing if we wished, but the
outstanding feature is that we cannot wish that way, for
the material conditions governing our lives compel us to
act in sonic way, and the particular way is determined by
our mental generalisations of sense perceived facts, for
we cannot get knowledge in any other way. Time was
when people thought that some things tended to rise
and some to fall, but the theory of gravitation offers a
much better explanation by taking as its starting point
the idea that all things are attracted towards each other,
whereby they are saved from wasting time trying to
find out which things tend to fall and which to rise,
without things being any different in fact, for gravity
had operated all the time on all things, prior to the
discovery of its general law. And just in the same way
the knowledge that the human will is nothing but an
abstract idea built up from sense perceptions of those
impulses that are strongest, saves us from foolishly
wasting time trying to discover how far our acts are
determined and how far they are free, without in the

176 THINKING

least altering the way in which man, including the rest
of nature, develops, for this has been operative at all
times just like the principle of gravity. Those who
argue that the human will is free within limits, a freedom
analogous to that of a bird within the limits of its cage,
might as well argue, as in our previous illustration, that
a cork in water is free from the influence of gravity
when it rises to the surface of the water which limits its
rising capacity.

If it be granted that the general statement of
determinism (not pre-determinism or fatalism) is true,
how do we account for those individuals who have
developed inertia consequent upon holding the idea that
socialism is inevitable ? It is simply that the thought,
sense perceived, has been one of the determining"
influences which, taken altogether, establish a balance
of impulses and consequent inaction in that particular
line (a balance in all lines at the same time is impossible,
for we must act in some way) ; the practical corrective
(from the writer's standpoint) for this state of mind is
economic pressure direct or indirect on that particular
individual to which he will or rather must respond one
way or another, although it might, and sometimes does,
result in suicide; the theoretical corrective is, of course,
a study of logic. (The special and the general as relating
to this question have already been dealt with under
Freedom and Will, page 161.)

Would it be right for Socialists to confiscate the
Property of Capitalists, or, is it right to Steal? This
question, like very many others, betrays an unconscious
mixing up of ideas in that it pre-supposes the socialisa-
tion of the means of production, and stealing, to be one
and the same thing; as they are quite different we must
answer the two questions separately.

(i) Is it right to steal?

The idea of stealing can arise only on the basis of
privately-owned property, and its parts consist of
numerous sense perceptions of acts wherein certain
persons appropriate to their own uses, property which
by common consent belongs to other people. All

THINKING 177

moralit) is based upon the needs of mankind, and the
serving of the general needs <>t' any special part oi man
kind is ensured by might; there can be no morality that
transcends this, for "eternal" rights, even though

Strongly advocated, are of no avail, therefore, since
there is nothing thai is right " in itself," where stealing
serves some general need and is generally considered
right, it is right, and where generally considered wrong,
it is wrong.

Among early communal tribes it was quite common
to regard stealing from some other tribe as the proper
thing to do, while within the tribe, where things were
held in common, the idea could not apply; but as private
property developed inside the tribe, then, for the general
good of the tribe, stealing was considered immoral inside
while it still remained moral to steal from outside. As
tribes joined together to form nations the immorality ol
stealing became extended with the greater generalisa-
tion uj the common need, though it was still moral to
steal from other nations when needs decreed so, as in
the stealing of oil, coal, rubber, iron, etc., always, of
course, under some transcendental guise as " for the
greater honour and glory of Cod." or " in the interests
of civilisation and progress." But with the wages
system the human race has been divided into wage-
workers and capitalists, which alters the question of
stealing the means of production into that of socialising
them.

(_•) Would it be right to socialise the means of
production ?

This question, like the previous one, can arise only
on the basis of privately-owned property, but not until
that property has gone through a long course of
historical development and has arrived at the point
where it is against the general need, inasmuch as
the workers are the most numerous but, speaking
relatively, fare very badly ; and this under conditions that
are technically capable of providing equitably for all.

The idea of socialisation is a mental generalistion
aiising from many sense perceptions of the fact that
ownership of the product depends upon ownership of

M

178 THINKING

the means of producing it; and since the workers
constitute the general mass of the people they see that
the general needs of the human race concerning wealth,
production, and distribution can be served only by the
social ownership of factories, tools, railways, etc. The
conservative owning class speak of socialisation as
stealing, they make their special needs (profit) into the
general and say " stealing is wrong in the sight of God
and man " (except when they go to war for new markets
and raw materials). They do not rely, however, merely
on the preaching of this abstract principle, but rather
on the physical force of military and police. On the
other hand, sentimental socialists say that the means
of life are the " free gifts of God " and ought to belong
to all men. What these people do not see is that their
abstract contention can only be realised by might, the
might of an economically-organised working class. So,
because it is in the interests of the general welfare, it
becomes right to think of socialising the means of pro-
duction, and since the end is justified so are the means
to that end. The idea of paying for them is absurd, for,
according to the most liberal estimates, the working
class receive only a quarter of the product, and this must
be consumed in order to keep them alive.

For those who see no difference between socialising
and stealing, we must point out that stealing implies the
complete dispossession of the former owner, while
socialisation implies joint ownership. It is, therefore,
right to socialise the means of life in general, but wrong
to steal property not included in those means, because
the former serves a general need, the latter only a
special one.

Why is Evil Desirable! Nothing is evil in itself
or good in itself. All acts are performed with the
intention of serving man's needs, no matter how
depraved those needs may be as viewed from other
people's standpoints. Those acts which serve general
needs are sense perceived, whereupon we mentally
separate those parts of the acts which give general satis-
faction, from all other parts, and add them together into

THINKING 179

the one idea of goodness. * m the other hand, all acts
which, though they may serve individual or special
needs, yet are opposed to the general good, are similarly
sense perceived and their common features generalised
by the understanding into the idea of evil. There may,
of course, be any number of generals, each of which
becomes a special in relation to a greater general; for
example, one kind of food may be good for cue member
of a family but bad for the family in general; or what
one whole family may consider good for itself may be
generally bad for some organisation to which it belongs;
similarly, what may be good for that particular organisa
tion may be bad for the class to which it belongs, and
finally, what may be good for one class may be bad from
the general standpoint of the whole of the people. Evil
is that which is particular or special from the standpoint
of any given general view, while good is that general
itself. Therefore, evil is desirable because it is good
within a relatively small circle, and within this circle
it is good because it serves some need.

Is Machine Production Beneficial for Society? We
had better know what we are talking about before
we start, for we cannot get a solution unless we
know the limits of the question; therefore we
must mark off the circle of phenomena we wish
to investigate. If by "machine production" we
mean the machine production of commodities (the
words could mean many other things; for example,
astronomical observations with an equatorial telescope,
current coins turned out from the Mint, gramophone
tunes, etc.), the question becomes clear, and all we need
do is to split it into its essential ideas, then take each
one separately and split it into its parts to see how
the generalisations arise. It is only alter this process
has been gone through that we can get an accurate
solution, for only then can we see whether or not the
generalisations correspond with reality; though we may,
and occasionally do, get right by accident so far
as our awareness is concerned. After limiting the
question to the machine production of commodities, the

180 THINKING

essential ideas are "beneficial " and " society." From
the standpoint of commodity production and the distri-
bution of the product, the idea of "society" is an
abstract generalisation that embraces too much, seeing
that society is divided into workers and capitalists whose
economic interests are opposed; the idea, accordingly,
does not correspond with reality, nor can it so long as
the conflicting interests are facts; therefore, in this
connection the word " society " is an error. With regard
to the idea of "benefit," that which is beneficial must
be sense perceived as serving some need, and if we
analyse these needs we shall find the limitations within
which the term can be accurately employed.

Assume an individual who owns a machine that enables
him by its output to withdraw from the socially-produced
surplus value a greater amount of that value in money
form than he contributes in commodity form, obviously
that would be specially good for him but generally bad
for the others. The same applies to group ownership
within the capitalist class, for the success of one group
would be special as compared with the general needs
of the whole class. But now, taking the whole capitalist
class as a general by itself, since profit (surplus value)
is socially produced, that is, by the combined total
capital, then in proportion as the application of
machinery extends their field of exploitation into the
world of unskilled labour, so in general does the whole
of the capitalist class, considered as a unit, derive special
benefit from its special ownership of the machines, while
the working class in general gets no more than a living.
Therefore, not until the workers force the principle of
the social ownership of machinery, etc., can they partake
of the total product in proportion to their contribution;
consequently, not till then could we say that machinery
benefits society as a whole, for it is only under those
conditions that society will be a whole in relation to such
a question.

Is Happiness as an end in i'icw morally justified}
The moral, as we have demonstrated, is that which
serves the general needs of any definite social

Til INK INC

group. If any person attains happiness by pursuing
a course of action that serves those general needs,
then, even though the pursuit <>f happiness be the
end in view rather than the general good of his

group, it is justified; in the reverse case it is
not. The same remarks apply to a small group within
a large and. therefore, more general group, where an
individual thinks his actions to be in the general interest,
it might he necessary to restrain him by the general
might, for his is a special case: for example, a religious
fanatic whose revivalist tendencies make for insanin
among his followers.

Is it desirable that all people should have good
health? Here we have a question that may he
taken as a type of many similarly silly questions,
it is like asking "should all people he virtuous?"
or "is education a good thing?" Such questions
are so far removed in the abstract from their
concrete bases (sense perceptions') that no intelligent
answers can he given until we have first brought them
down to earth as it were, and the only wav to do this
is to substitute some practical question for the one
submitted, for if we say " yes " in answer to our original
question the answer has no practical value, it tells us
nothing as to how good health may he secured because
there is no absolutely general viewpoint in such ma1

For the sake of argument, let us assume that it i- in
the general interest and, therefore, desirable that all
people should have good health. To carry this desire
into effect it would be necessary to enlist the services of
doctors, nurses and all persons capable ctf curing others,
and if the desire were attained these people would have
no work, and, from their particular standpoint,
such an end is not desirable, so what are we to
do? Provide for them at the public expense?1 Rut,
public provision for doctors and nurses involves
taxation, and taxation can never be quite equitable,
so now the practical question submitted in place
of the original one takes this form fit might
take other forms, all that is meant just here is that it

182 THINKING

must take a practical form) " is State payment and
control of the medical faculty desirable." and, from the
workers' standpoint, we might add " and should
workers work for this through their political or other
organisations " ?

From the standpoint of those of the medical and
nursing fraternities who fear bad administration, undue
interference on the part of authorities, etc., the answer
is in the negative. From those who are already in good
health, but who would have to contribute, the general
answer would probably be the same. It would be
unprofitable at this point to follow out all the con-
flicting interests involved, even were it possible;
all we need notice is that no intelligent answer
can be given without a knowledge of the material
conditions which, in communion with the senses, produce
the sense perceptions from which the understanding
derives its generalisation. Regarding the workers'
interest in such a question, they need not waste any time
on it, for if it is decided before the advent of socialism
it will be by the generalising of the common features of
the conflicting interests to which we have just referred,
and these are interests in which workers have no control.
Under communism, State support and control of the
medical service would, of course, be a foregone conclu-
sion, because by that time the chief contradictions
between the different interests, which are mainly
financial, would have already been solved through the
successive over-riding of special interests by an ever-
widening general, and, therefore, there would be no
reason to interfere with the administration and directive
ability of those who know best how to manage their
own special work.

Are Strikes Unreasonable? Once again! All ideas
are brought into being by the understanding generalis-
ing sense perceptions. Assume some working men
have sense perceptions of what seems to them bad
conditions in the workshop (bad because they do not
serve their general need). Each one has a generalisation
of his own, the result of his own reasoning. By con-

THINKING 183

faring with one another they pool the common feature
of their separate and small generalisations into one idea,
a greater generalisation, by taking a vote. If the

derision is to strike then evidently that decision is
arrived at by the general reason of that particular group
of persons, and consequently is reasonable. But if this
of men constitute only a small section of those
engaged in the whole industry, and if the rest of the
main body do not think them justified or wise in their
decision, then that decision, though general and reason-
able for t lie smaller body, becomes particular or special
when regarded from the standpoint of the larger body,
and. of course, unreasonable, though if the larger body
uphold the decision of the smaller one it remains
reasonable ; this is from the point of view of the workers.
But since strikes in these days always mean a blow at
some section of the capitalist class, either in attack or
defence, then, from the point of view of the general
body of capitalists, strikes are always unreasonable, as
witness their views in the Press.

The foregoing leads to the next question, for if the
reasonable is that which is general within the limits of
a certain group, and this general is determined by taking
a vote, does it follow that majority decisions, though
reasonable, are always right ?

Arc Majorities always Right? The findings of
a majority, as we have said, are reasonable because
they are the product of reasoning in general as
opposed to the reasoning in particular of smaller groups
or of individuals; but these findings are not right, or
true, unless they correspond with reality outside the
mind; for it is often the fact that majority decisions in
relation to industrial conditions are mere mental com-
binations built up, it is true, from sense perceptions of
real parts existing outside the mind, but which do not
exist as combinations outside the mind. Such decisions
are generalisations which it is anticipated will serve
some general need, but if the decisions are found to be
impracticable, the general needs are not served, which
is only another way of saying that the generalisations

184 THINKING

are errors; but it is only after the trial that they are
seen to be unreasonable, because it is only then that
they are seen to be incorrect. In case we should think
this to be a contradiction, let us remember that
after the trial a new set of sense perceptions has
become available and they necessarily alter the previous
generalisation, so what was previously reasonable
becomes unreasonable. It is important to remember
that error results from combining- too few factors as
well as from combining too many.

Should Workers Serve on Trade Union Executives?
The means to an end are justified provided the
end is justified. Since capitalism has been proved
to be immoral because it does not serve the general
needs of all people, it follows that those members
of executives who interest themselves in making
capitalism run smoothly, for example, those who
support Whitley councils, Douglas (or other) credit
schemes, " increased production," craft distinctions,
etc., are not serving the general needs, and, conse-
quently, are acting immorally, whether they know it or
not, " ignorance of the law is no defence." Therefore,
workers should serve on trade union executives only
when by doing so they can contribute anything that will
develop the workers' organised might, the might that
is needed to demonstrate their general morality; for
example, any move towards the abandonment of craft
distinctions, or advocating and helping to carry out an
educational policy that is independent of capitalist
class influence, viz., that kind known as Independent
Working-Class Education, which deals with those
branches of social science calculated to give workers
the knowledge of the correct relations between them-
selves and their masters.

Abstract and Conclusion. We opened this intro-
duction by demonstrating the need for a method of
arriving at truth, and then outlined the evolution
from nebula to man, in which took place the gradual
development of organs of sense and brains. From
sense perceptions of things not classified and, there-

THINKING 185

fore, not understood, men instinctively generalised
notions of religious practices, gods and mythological

legends which later developed into the several greal
religions that are now very much on the wane; this
was one great line of thought. The next, beginning six
centuries before Christ, was that of philosophy, in which
men took to the investigation of nature in their search
for truth, but as the results were disappointing,
inasmuch as everything was changing and consequently
there seemed no hope of arriving at any permanent truth
in nature, they turned to search for reality in the study
of mind. It was a hopeless quest, but has been pursued
up to the present time, though it is now waning and
beginning to follow religion on the downward grade.
The third and last great line of thinking is known as
science, it began about six centuries ago By taking once
more to the study of nature, and, due to the newer tools
and possibilities of research, it has had a long line of
brilliant successes. It shed its light on philosophy and
drove philosophers to study thinking rather than the
reality of mind as an entity; this move was finally
completed by a method of dialectic logic, through the
work of Joseph Dietzgen, who placed thinking on a level
with all other science by discovering its general law —
that of combining parts into wholes or the reverse; with
the establishing of this law philosophy as such ceased
to be, its place being taken by the " Science of
I nderstanding. '

We now have a scientific method of attacking all
problems, but, like all methods, it is no use without
material upon which to work. This material, as far as
the past is concerned, is to be found in historical study,
and with regard to the present in the study of economics
and allied subjects. The material is little use without
the method, nor the method without the material; those
who have any sense worth having will study both, for
there are only two alternatives, one is to retire from
discussion and become a social hermit, the other is to be
a fool who opens his lips only to be held up to ridicule
by the rising army of proletarian logicians. But in the
hope that readers will not let the principles taught herein

186 THINKING

drop out of their minds as the book drops out of their
hands, but will begin to apply them and so grow into
the habit of thinking scientifically, we give one more
example by describing this end as

The Beginning.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

\i ! EN, GRANT. The Evolution of the Idea of God : Watts and Co.,
London, 1908.

Bax, E. Bf.i.iort. The French Revolution : Swan Sonnenschcin,

London, 1907.
BSRGSOM, Henri. Creative Evolution: Macmillan and Co.,

London, 191 1.
BuCHNBR, Ludwig. Force and Matter : Trtibncr and Co.,

London, 1864.
Buchner, L. Last Words on Materialism . Watts, London, 1901.

CARR, H. Wii.don. The Philosophy of Change : T. C. and E. C.

Jack, London.
CRAIK, W. W. Outlines of Philosophic Logic : Out of print.

I I'HOLBACH. The Systetn of Nature : Truelovc, London, 1S84.
DlETZGRN, Joseph. The Positive Outcome of Philosophy : Kerr,

Chicago, 1906.
Dietzgen, Joseph. Philosophical Essays : Kerr, Chicago, 1017.

Engels, F. Landmarks of Scientific Socialism : Kerr, Chicago, 1907,
ENGELS, F. Feuerbach — The Roots of the Socialist Philosophy : Kerr,

Chicago, 1912.
Engels, F. Socialism, Utopian and Scientific : Swan Sonncnschcin,

London, 1907.
Engei.s, I". Origin of the family : Kerr, Chicago, 1910.

Fairgrieve, James. Geography and World Power : University ot
London E*ressl London, 1920.

Hegel. History of Philosophy : Kegan Paul, London, 1892.
Hogarth, D. G. The Ancient East : Home University Library.
Williams and Norgate, London.

Jarrett, Bede. Mediaeval Socialism : T. C. and E. C. Jack,
London.

Kautsky. Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History t
Kerr, Chicago, 1918.

187

188 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lewes, G. H. The History of Philosophy : Longmans, Green,
London, 1871.

McCabe, Joseph. Evolution from Nebula to Man : Milner and Co.,

Manchester.
Marx, Karl. Critique of Political Economy (Preface) ." Kerr,

Chicago, 1913.
Marx and Engels. Communist Manifesto : S. L. Press, Glasgow.
Meily, Clarence. Puritanism : Kerr, Chicago.
Morgan, Lewis H. Ancient Society : Kerr, Chicago.

Paul, William. The Stale ; its Origin and Function : S. L. Press,

Glasgow.
Plechanoff, George. Anarchism and Socialism : Kerr, Chicago,

1918.

Russell, Bertrand. The Problems of Philosophy : H. U. Library,
Williams and Norgate, London, 191 8.

Webb, C. C. J. A History of Philosophy : H. U. Library, Williams
and Norgate, London.

INDEX

Abelard .

• 53

Brahma .

• t-^

Absolute, the .

88-00, <m

Brain work

129-134

Academy, the .

• 35

Broad Mind, the

13

Academicians, the New . 47

Bruno, Giordano

. 62

Adaptation

• 83

Bilchner .

. 109

Agnosticism

• 13

Butler

. 81

Albertus Magnus

. 60

Anaxagoras

28, 41

Carneades

• 47

Anaximander .

• 27

Cassiodorus

• 5i

Anaximenes

• ~1

Categorical imperative 80, 81, 83

Anselm

53. 6G

Categories, Kantian

• 78

Antagonism of

material

Causality, the problem of . 73

interests

56-9

Cause and Effect

140-2

Antisthenes

• 32

Chattel slavery.

26, 50

<j posteriori ideas

• 76

Christianity and Christians

</ priori idea-, .

75. 84

43-6, 49. 55.

56. 59, 60

Aquinas .

• 5.5

Civilisation, beginnin

22-3

Arabian Philosophy

• 54

Clark

. 81

Arcesilaus

• 47

Columbus

. 61

Anstippus

• 3*

Comte

61. 87

Aristocles

• 33

Confusion of Schoolmen 53-6,

Aristotle 35-6,

37.

41. 55. 6o

58

'.1 62, 82

Constitutive notions

76-7

Augustine

14, 00, 113

Copernicus

. 61

Authority, appea

1 to

12

Coueism .

. 162

Averroes .

• 54

Cratylus .
Creation, the

• 33
. 49

Bacon, Francis.

61,

65. 7°. 95.

Cudwortfa

. 8[

102

Cuvier

. 104

Bacon, Roger .

60, IOI

Cynics

• 32

Baer, Karl von

. 104

Cyrenaics

31-2

Bain

• 05

Beauty .

83-4. 159

Hark Ayes

• 52

Bentham

. y6

Darkness

■ 1 r

Bergson .

98-9. "7

Darwin

, 104

Berkeley .

71"2. 74

Deduction

Oo, [Ol

Boethnis .

• 5-:

1 democracy

. 170

Boyle

. 104

Democritus

• 37

189

i go

INDEX

Descartes . 64-7, 73, 85, 102
Destiny v. Grace . . 44

Determinism, see Freedom.
Determinism and Education

175-6
D'Holbach . . .106

Dialectics . 29, 30, 31, 89

Dialectic method 89-92, 93, in
Dietzgen . . .113, 185

Diogenes . . . -32

Double standard of truth. 56
Dualism . . . -85

Duns Scotus

55, 69, 102

Ecstatic union with God

Education

Effect

Eleatics .

Electron theory

Encyclopaedists

End and Means

Engels

Epicureanism

Epicurus .

Evil

Evolution, inorganic

Evolution, organic

Evolution, of societies

Feudalism

Feuerbach

Fichte

Force and Matter

Force and Matter

Freedom .

Freedom and Will

48

173-5

140-1

• 29

98, 105

. 106

167-8, 173,

178, 184

93, no, in

38, 44- 47

38

178-9
16-8

18-21
21-3

• 57

IIO-II

87-8

M5-5I

. no

82-3, 99

160-2

Galileo . . . .62

Geometry, principles of, not

eternal . . -144

Gilbert . . . .62

God .... 163

God, the idea of one 25, 42

Grace of God . . -44

Gravity . . . 145

Green, Thomas Hill . . 96-7

Hamilton, Sir W. . . 87

Happiness, moral aspect of 180-1

Hartley

Harvey

Heat

Hegel

Hegelians, Young

Herachtus

Hobbes

Holiness

Humanitarian princi

Hume . 72-3, 74

Hutcheson

Hutton .

Hypnotism

Ideals

Ideas, association of

Immortality

Inductive method

Innate ideas

Inquisition, the

Islamism

I. W.— C. E. .

James, William
Jews . . 24, 1

Johnson, Dr.
Justinian

Kant 73, 75-85, 86

Kepler
Knowledge

P]

• 95
. 104
. 146
89-93

93. "°

• 27
67, 95- i°2

167-9
es 1 71 -3
75. 81, 95
. 81
. 104
. 162

• 173
95. 96

83, 158-9

60-1, 101

69-70

. 62

• 54
174, 184

• 97
2-3. 45. 57

• 72

• 54

90, 92-93.

104, 108

. 62

162-3

Laplace . . . .104

Lavoisier . . .104

Leibnitz . . 68-9, 70, 74

Life . . . 156-8

Life, principle of -97

Light . • . .146

Lippershey . . .62

Locke . 69-71, 74, 95, 103
Logic . 36, 39, 52, 60, 122
Logic, philosophic 123-5, 134
Logic, philosophic, applied

to mind and matter 126-37
Lyceum, the . . -36

Machine production bene-
fits of .

179-80

INDKX

191

Mahomet . . • 54

Majority dot isions, lightness

of . . 183-4

Malebrani be . .68

Hansel, H. 1 87

Man . . 93, no, 1 1 1-2

Marx, quotation from 63, 113

Matin. 1I1-111 . 61, 86

Materialism, English 101-5

Materialism, French . 105-8

Materialism, German 108-10
Materialists 1 onception of

History . . n 1-3

Materialists, " metaphysical "

no
Mathematicians, the . 30

Matter . 121-2, 136-7, 145
Mechanical conception of

universe

Mediator, the .
Metaphysit s
Mill, fames
Mill, John Stuart
Mind

67
45

77-9
95

95-6
121-2, 134-5

Mind and Matter 36, 39, 85, 137
Moleschotte . . . 109
Monetary' power . 58, 166

Monotheism, see God, the

idea of one.
Morality . . 163-7, J77"8

Moral reflex . . 80-1

Motion . . . .148

Mysticism . . .48

Nature

Nebular Theory

NeoplatonisN . 43,

Newton .

.\i'-t.

Nominalists

Nothing .

Noumenon

Occam, William of .
malism .

1 Mitological argument

Pantheism

Parmenides

Perfection

138-40

16-7

44, 46-9

. 104

94-5

55-6

M9

76-7

53

• 56

67-8

66, 90

. 68

. 28
1 59-60

Pelagius . . . .44
Phenomena . . 76, 84
Philo ... 47

Philosophei . defined . 15
Philosophy, Ancient Bchoolfl of,

29-3°. 3i. 37. 4^7
Philosophy, < ompari on of
Ancient and Modern . 99

Philosophy, pn tblems

1 '1 1 \ ;■ 1 ; . tin- .

Plato 31, 32-5, 37
Plotinus .
Porphyry .
c

1 iv, 1 1, ables. the
Price, Ri( haul .
Priestly .

IS .

Psychologist . tlie en;

Pyrrbo

Pythagoras

pirii al

Rationalism

Realism .

Reason, pure
Reason, practical
Reasonable, the
Regulative notions

.
Relativity

Renaissance . 54,
R< volution, French
Revelation, ( rerman
Right

Kos. ellinus
Rousseau.

tif 1 1 10

. 29

5, 66

47-8

49. 52

149

52

81

104

49

95

37
27-8

. 86

53. 55. 97. IQ3-5
7Q, 82

. 80

79.
63. 7

152-5
81, 86

• 95

• «7
, 1 00

92-3
. 109

163-7

• 53

IoO

Scepticism
Si -jitics .
Scheele

St helling .

Scholasticism and Scholasl

52 3. 82
Schopenhauer .
S< uiiv e, positive

Si Ottisfa School
Sensational School

(See also Bacon, Hobbes
Locke).
Sense perceptions . 130

37. 44. 73
30.38
. 104
. 88

93 4

95

105

192

INDEX

Shaftesbury

. 81

Time, the essence of reality 98-9

Shaw, G. B.

• 97

Tithes

• 57

Silence

• !47

Trade Union Executives,

Smith, Adam .

. 81

morality of serving on

. 184

Socialisation of property,

Trinity, the Alexandrian

. 48

limits of justification

176-8

Trinity, the Christian

46- 53

Socrates . 31, 32, 33,

41. 49

Truth and Error

• 152

Something

• 149

Truth, method of finding

132-4

Sophists .

• 30

Sound

• 147

Unit, the mathematical

143-4

Space

• M4

Universe, parts of the

127-8

Spencer, Herbert 61, 87,

96, 97

Unnatural, the

139-40

Spinoza . . . 68,

74.82

Urea, synthetic

. 104

Stewart, Dugald

• 95

Usury . .

58, 166

Stillness .

. 148

Utilitarianism .

. 96

Stoicism .

38, 44

Utopians and Utopianisrr

1 —

Stoics

38-9

Ancient

• 113

Straightness

1 423

Mediaeval

1 1 3-4

Strikes

182-3

Modern

114-6

Substitution of practical

questions for abstract

Vedism .

• 42

ones

181-2

Vesalius .

. 62

Superman, the doctrine of . 95

Vogt, Carl

. 109

Synthetic philosophy

• 97

Voltaire

. 106

System of Nature, TJ

e,

argument in .

106-7

Will, the freedom of the

44.

68, 82

Teleology

. 28

William of Champeaux

. 56

Telescope, inventor and

" Will to live," the .

• 94

date of.

. 62

Wohler .

. 104

Thales

. 26

" Word," the .

• 47

Theology

• 43

Thought .

129-30

Zeno (of Elea, dialectician

)• 29

Time

• M4

Zeno (Stoic)

• 38

Time and Freewill

98-9

Zoroaster.

• 42

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